Page 139 of Hunting Pretty

I stared at the screen, my heart pounding in my chest. The image of his face peaceful, almost boyish in sleep, stared back at me from the photo I had just uploaded.

I wasn’t sure this would work, but it was the only lead I had. I had to try.

My finger hovered over the Search button for just a moment, my breath catching in my throat. What if knowing his real name changed everything?

I hit Search.

The seconds ticked by in agonizing silence, my pulseloud in my ears. And then his old driver’s license appeared, bold letters staring back at me on the screen.

Tynan Donahue.

I blinked, my mind scrambling to make sense of it.Tynan.I rolled the name over in my head, the syllables heavy on my tongue.

It felt so… familiar, like it belonged to a memory I couldn’t quite reach.

And then it hit me.

Ty.I used to call him Ty.

A cold shiver ran down my spine as the name clicked into place. Ty. My foster brother. The boy who used to be my friend, my protector.

I frowned. Didn’t Scáth—Ty—say something about not showing up in the system?

Then I realized that this picture of Ty I was staring at was at least five years old.

It must be an old license.

I clicked through the database but it seemed like this was the last record of Ty’s driver’s license.

Well, obviously Scáth—Ty—had scrubbed his most recent license record. But he forgot to scrub this old one.

But now I had his name and his birthdate.

My hands moved automatically as I opened the birth and death records register, searching for anything about Tynan and his family.

It didn’t take long.

I found his mother first: Mona Donahue.She died when Ty was just a boy.

I swallowed hard, a pang of empathy hitting me like a sharp twist in my chest. I knew that feeling. I knewwhat it was like to lose your parents, to be left behind, alone.

My own memories of my parents were faded, more like distant dreams than anything real.

The first clear memories I had were of that awful orphanage. Of being unwanted.

Scáth had lost his mother, too.

And then I found his father: Adam Donahue.

He’d died five years ago… when Scáth was seventeen.

Something about this made my stomach twist. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it made me uncomfortable, like there was something lurking just beyond the edges of my memory. I shook it off, trying to focus.

Next, I opened theDarkmoor Times’ newspaper database. Expensive and comprehensive software, able to search through international archives, old databases, and sources that most people didn’t have access to.

I typed inTynan Donahueand paused, my fingers hovering over the keys.

A strange warning feeling pulsed through me, like my gut was trying to tell me I wasn’t going to like what I found.

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