Page 133 of Hunting Pretty

Because I knew that once I admitted it to myself, there’d be no going back. And that thought chilled me to the bone.

I was falling for my stalker.

Even though he was keeping things from me.

Even though I didn’t even know his name.

As the driver fussed with the bags behind me, I climbed the stone stairs to my home back in Dublin with my head bent over my phone, staring at the stolen photo I’d taken of Scáth that morning.

Defiance had flared in me as I’d reached for my phone, as I justified it to myself. Every girl deserved to have at least one photo of their boyfriend, right?

If that’s what I could call him.

Besides, he’d stolen a photo from me.

Only fair that I stole one back.

I was so distracted that I jumped when the front door suddenly opened. I stumbled back a step, hand at my jolted heart.

“Ebony, you scared the— Ebony?”

My adopted mother, who was the epitome of class, decorum, and self-restraint, had mascara running down her pale porcelain cheeks. Her teary eyes were rubbed raw and red.

Her obvious distress was only mitigated by her obvious surprise at seeing me there on the steps.

“Ava,” she said, “my goodness. I wasn’t expecting you.”

I laughed awkwardly. “Lisa and I decided to come back early. We caught a commercial flight.”

Already the pain was melting from her features.

I reached out to touch Ebony’s arm, and she gave it an awkward pat. “Thank you, dear. But I’m perfectly fine.”

My arm fell heavily back to my side as Ebony sniffed and drew herself back into a rigidly erect posture.

Despite her being my mother now, we never shared much physical touch.

What was just a natural human instinct to comfort someone felt like crossing a line with Ebony. She was too independent, too self-sufficient.

“I must look ridiculous,” she said. “How embarrassing.”

“It’s okay,” I muttered. “Are you okay?”

She smiled and shook her head as she pulled a compact from her small hand purse.

“I’m far too experienced to let a bad surgery affect me like this,” Ebony said, blotting at her face with a compact as a black sedan circled around the drive. “It’s unprofessional. And detrimental to the good Icando, to focus so much on what Icannot.”

There was hardly any evidence left of the emotional woman I’d startled so terribly at the door.

Ebony stared over my head with a fixed determination, coolheaded and calm.

“Remember that, Ava,” she said, eyes slipping to mine for just an instant. “The greater good.”

I was silent and Ebony took my silence with a curt nod of her chin. “I trust Paris was a welcome break.”

I nodded, shoving down the memory of the man who tried to kill me and his lifeless eyes in the shadows of Père Lachaise Cemetery.

They’d have found his body by now, I’m sure, burned to a crisp thanks to Scáth, a can of gasoline, and a match.

---