Page 149 of Hunting Pretty

My stomach lurched, a sickening churn that grew with every button he undid.

But my arms wouldn’t work to push him away.

Cold oppressive air crushed against my bare chest as he opened the front of my nightgown.

“Sweet, sweet girl.”

I shook off this memory like it was a spider that crawled up into my clothes and I curled even further into Scáth’s chest as he held me in the armchair.

His touch was the only thing that soothed me.

Could make me stop hearing his sticky voice.

Sweet, sweet girl.

I wanted to scream until I couldn’t hear him anymore.

I didn’t want to remember anything else.

Didn’t want to see the same fragment over and over.

Didn’t want to feel myself about to get ripped open again and again.

A dangerous gleam shone from his beady eyes…

I pressed my hand into my eyes to rub out the image. I couldn’t stop seeing his fucking eyes. That fucking sick hungry stare that felt like raking fingernails over my sensitive skin.

“Make it stop, Ty,” I begged.

He froze, something dark flashing over his face.

“Where did you hear that name?” he asked in a hollow, hoarse voice.

I frowned.

“I saw articles about you… that you went to jail after you killed your father.”

He shook his head, his dark hair falling into his eyes.

“Don’tcall me Ty” he spat, his voice laced with bitterness. “Ty is dead.”

As I pieced together the fragments of the truth, a realization settled over me like a weight on my chest.

Scáth—no,Ty—had been hiding from more than just the world. He was hiding from himself.

I’d spent so much time wondering why he wouldn’t give me his real name, why he’d kept that part of him locked away like a secret too dark to speak. But now, it made sense.

Ty didn’t exist anymore—not in the way I remembered him. He had been destroyed, torn apart by the guilt that had broken him.

I could see it now, the cracks that ran through him, deep and jagged, too painful for him to face.

What he had done, what he had become—Scáth—wasn’t just a new identity. It was a way to bury the past, to buryTy.

The name carried too much weight, too many memories he couldn’t bear to confront.

He hadn’t told me his name because Ty no longer lived inside him. That boy I’d once known, the boy I called Ty, was gone.

In his place was Scáth—a shadow, a version of him built from the wreckage of whatever horrors he had endured.

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