Chapter 10 Iris
IRIS
I lean back, rolling my shoulders. Standard corporate espionage job—find out if the CEO’s embezzling, get proof, get paid. Easy money. The kind of work that pays my rent while I plan my next move against the Ivanov brothers.
Against Alexi.
My fingers hesitate over the keyboard. Less than six hours until he shows up at my door. Less than six hours to figure out what the hell I’m doing, agreeing to have dinner with a man who cornered me in an alley and threatened to—
Focus.
I dive into the next directory, fingers flying across keys. Financial records. Board meeting minutes. Nothing interesting.
Then I hit the subsidiary files.
The folder structure changes. Tighter encryption. Military-grade protocols that have no business being in a pharmaceutical company’s servers.
Red flags everywhere.
I should stop. Log out. Pretend I never saw this.
But my hands keep moving, muscle memory overriding common sense. Just a quick look. Just enough to confirm what this is before I bail.
The first document loads.
Department of Defense. Project Nightshade. Classified.
Ice floods my veins.
No. No.
I slam the laptop shut, heart hammering against my ribs. Fuck. Fuck.
Government systems. I just breached government systems.
The same kind of breach that got my parents killed.
My hands shake as I reopen the laptop, force myself to think through the panic. Backtrack. Clean the logs. Erase every trace that I was ever here.
The cursor blinks at me, mocking.
Because I was sloppy. Because I’ve been distracted, thinking about green eyes and sharp smiles and the weight of a body pinning me against a brick wall. Because instead of running my usual checks, I’ve been obsessing over what to wear tonight, whether to cancel, and whether I want to cancel.
Whether I want him to make good on that threat about my mattress.
I scrub my hands over my face. Get it together, Mitchell.
My fingers fly across the keyboard, executing cleanup protocols I could do in my sleep. Except my mind keeps drifting—to Alexi’s thumb against my pulse, his hips grinding forward, that low voice promising he’d never stop hunting me.
A notification pops up. System trace initiated.
My blood turns to ice.
They’re tracking the breach. Right now. Following my digital footprints back through the network.
The trace splits into three branches, each probing a different exit point.
Amateur hour.
My pulse steadies. The panic crystallizes into sharp focus, muscle memory from years of NSA training taking over. I watch the trace crawl through the network, identifying the algorithms they’re using. Standard DoD protocols. The same ones I helped design when I was nineteen.
Poor bastards.
I open a second terminal, fingers moving faster than thought. The trace follows breadcrumbs I left—intentional vulnerabilities in my cleanup that appear to be mistakes. Rookie errors. The kind of sloppiness that screams an inexperienced hacker is in over their head.
They’ll follow those. They always do.
Meanwhile, I built a ghost image of my actual intrusion, fragmenting it across seventeen servers scattered across Eastern Europe. Each fragment looks like unrelated traffic. Random data packets that mean nothing on their own.
The trace locks onto my first decoy. A burner server in Morocco that I maintain for exactly this purpose.
“Come on,” I mutter, watching them commit resources to the wrong target. “Take the bait.”
They do.
The second trace branch veers toward a dead drop in Singapore. The third keeps searching, probing for my real signature.
That one’s smart. That one knows what to look for.
I feed it corrupted data packets, fragments of code that suggest I’m bouncing through the Tor network. Misdirection layered on top of misdirection, each false trail requiring just enough effort to crack that they’ll believe they’re getting somewhere.
The third trace commits. Follows my ghost into the dark web.
I exhale slowly, waiting. Watching. Making sure no fourth trace appears, no hidden protocol I missed.
Nothing.
My hands don’t shake as I execute the final cleanup, erasing my ghost image piece by piece. The DoD team will spend weeks chasing phantoms through dead servers, finding nothing but their own confusion.
By the time they realize they’ve been played, the original breach will be buried under so much noise they’ll never reconstruct it.
I close the laptop. Stand. Walk to the window on legs that barely hold me.
My reflection stares back—pale skin, dark circles under my eyes. I look like my mother did, those last few months before the accident. Before the cover-up.
Before everything.
My phone buzzes. A text from an unknown number.
Looking forward to tonight, Iris. Wear something that won’t slow you down when you try to run.
I stare at the message, jaw tight.
My thumbs move before my brain catches up.
Why would I be running? You’ll be the one running.
Send.
Three dots appear immediately. Disappear. Appear again.
Confident. I like that.
Heat crawls up my neck. I should throw the phone across the room. Block the number. Cancel this whole stupid idea before it goes any further.
Instead, I type: Confidence requires belief in an uncertain outcome. I’m just stating facts.
Facts?
Yes. By the end of tonight, you’ll realize you’re outmatched. Then you’ll run.
The response comes faster this time.
Outmatched in what, exactly?
I bite my lip, consider my next words carefully. Every message is a negotiation. Every word is a potential weapon.
Everything that matters.
Everything?
The single word carries weight I can feel through the screen. Heat. Promise. Threat.
My pulse kicks up despite myself.
Everything, I confirm.
The dots appear and disappear twice. Whatever he’s typing, he keeps deleting.
Finally: Tell me what you’re wearing right now.
“Fuck off,” I mutter at the screen.
But my free hand drifts to the hem of my tank top anyway, fingers tracing the fabric. Old MIT shirt, paint-stained. Ripped jeans I’ve owned since Stanford. My armor for a Tuesday afternoon of breaking into systems I have no business touching.
I type: Nothing you’ll see before dinner.
That’s not what I asked.
My breath catches. He’s not flirting. Not teasing. He’s demanding.
And my body responds like he’s still in that alley, pressed against me, stealing the air from my lungs.
I should shut this down. Remind him he doesn’t get to command me, doesn’t get to expect answers just because he corners well and knows how to use his body as a weapon.
Instead, I find myself typing: Tank top. Jeans. Wondering why you’re sexting when you’re supposed to be working.
Who says I’m not working?
Are you?
Always.
The word sends ice down my spine. Because I believe him. Because Alexi Ivanov doesn’t separate work from obsession, he doesn’t know where the line is between hunting and wanting.
Neither do I.