Chapter 6 Iris
IRIS
The Uber drops me three blocks from my apartment—habit more than caution. My heels click against wet pavement, Boston’s perpetual autumn drizzle misting my hair.
I shouldn’t have gone to the gala.
Risky. Unnecessary. A goddamn power trip watching Alexi Ivanov squirm while I dismantled his Frankfurt servers in real-time. But the look on his face when he’d spotted me across that ballroom—intrigue without understanding—made every risk worth it.
My phone buzzes. Maya.
Where are you? It’s 1 AM.
Walking home. Be there in 5.
You went to that thing, didn’t you?
I don’t respond. Maya knows me too well, knows the self-destructive streak that makes me poke bears I should leave alone.
Except the Ivanov brothers aren’t bears. They’re monsters wearing expensive suits, building empires on blood money while the world applauds their charitable donations. My parents’ “accident” has their fingerprints all over it—buried deep in encrypted files I’ve spent years excavating, but there.
And Alexi...
I smile despite myself. The youngest Ivanov is brilliant, unstable, and so easy to wind up, it’s almost unfair. Eight months of breaching his firewalls and he’s already obsessed, spinning in circles trying to catch a ghost he’ll never pin down.
You think highly of yourself.
His words echo in my head. Maybe I do. But I’ve earned the right.
My building appears through the mist: a converted warehouse in South Boston, the kind of place that looks condemned but houses million-dollar lofts. I key in the security code, already mentally cataloging tonight’s data haul.
The elevator ascends with its usual grinding protest. I lean against the mirrored wall, catching my reflection—black dress clinging to angles I don’t usually show, hair loose instead of pulled back, makeup Maya insisted I buy.
I look like someone else. Someone who goes to galas and flirts with dangerous men instead of hiding behind screens.
The thought unsettles me more than Alexi’s intensity or the way he’d almost cornered me against that wall before his brother interrupted.
Maya’s sprawled on our couch, laptop balanced on her knees, murder podcast playing through speakers.
“You’re insane,” she announces without looking up.
“Probably.”
Maya finally looks up, brown eyes sharp with concern. “You wore the dress.”
“You told me to buy it.”
“I told you to buy it for normal people events. Not for—” She gestures wildly. “—infiltrating enemy territory while actively committing felonies.”
I kick off my heels, let them clatter against the hardwood. “The felonies were already committed. I just went to watch the fallout.”
“Jesus, Iris.” Maya closes her laptop, sets it aside with deliberate care. “You could’ve been recognized. Someone could’ve seen you leaving. Security cameras—”
“Spoofed. I own that building’s entire surveillance system.” I drop onto the couch beside her, suddenly exhausted. “Every camera showed a perfect loop. I was never there.”
“Except you were. Physically present. Talking to people.” Maya’s voice softens. “Talking to him.”
I don’t ask how she knows. Maya reads me so freaking easily.
“It was stupid,” I admit.
“It was reckless.” She pulls the throw blanket over both of us, a familiar routine from a thousand late nights. “What happened?”
So, I tell her. The gala, the conversation, Alexi’s green eyes tracking me like prey. The thrill of watching him sprint for the exit when his servers started screaming. How close I’d come to staying, to pushing further, to seeing what would happen if—
“You’re playing with fire.” Maya’s shoulder presses against mine. “These aren’t white-hat hackers or corporate suits. The Ivanov brothers bury people.”
“They buried my parents.”
“Exactly.” Her hand finds mine, squeezes. “Which is why you need to be smarter than this. Surgical strikes, not... whatever tonight was.”
I rest my head on her shoulder, breathing in her familiar lavender shampoo. Maya’s right. She’s always right. But something about Alexi Ivanov gets under my skin, makes me want to abandon careful planning for chaos.
“He called me intriguing,” I murmur.
Maya snorts. “You are intriguing. You’re also a felony waiting to happen.” She shifts, looks at me directly. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Truly careful, not Iris Mitchell careful.”
“There’s a difference?”
“You know there is.”
I do know that. Because careful died with my parents when I was nineteen.
Before the “accident,” I played by the rules. Followed procedures. Believed systems worked if you trusted them. Then I was in a car wreck with my parents after a brake failure that didn’t match the physics, and my world turned upside down.
I’d already been gifted with computers, with math—child prodigy nonsense that got me into Stanford at sixteen. But after my parents died, coding became something else. A weapon. A way to pry open doors that kept slamming in my face.
Every investigation into their deaths hit a wall. Police reports vanished. Witnesses recanted. Security footage got corrupted. The kind of coordinated erasure that screamed cover-up to anyone paying attention.
So, I learned to hack. Not the script-kiddie garbage, but real penetration—breaking encryption, spoofing credentials, becoming invisible inside networks that were considered secure.
Mathematics had always made sense to me in ways people never did.
Code was just math with purpose, and my purpose was simple.
Find out who killed my parents and why.
The Ivanov name surfaced six months into my digging. Buried in fragmented emails, offshore account transfers, and a single reference to “the Boston problem” dated two days before my parents’ car went off that bridge. Not proof—never enough proof—but threads I’ve been following ever since.
“Iris.” Maya’s voice pulls me back. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Disappearing into your head.” She squeezes my hand harder. “I can practically hear you planning your next move.”
I blink, refocus on her concerned face. “I’m not—”
“You are.” Maya sighs. “Look, I get it. I know why you do this. But one day your luck’s going to run out, and then what? You’ll be too dead to get your answers.”
“Dramatic much?”
“Realistic much.” She stands, pulling me up with her. “Come on. You need actual sleep, not whatever pill-induced coma you’ve been doing.”
I let her tug me toward my bedroom, knowing she won’t rest until I’m in bed. Knowing she’s right about the recklessness, about the danger.
Knowing I’ll do it anyway.