Page 155 of Hunting Pretty

We’d been sneered at by all the sexy nurses and slutty cops, but we hadn’t cared. We’d snuck up to Todd’s rooftop, laughing our asses off with a smuggled flask of Jameson and promised we’dbegrannies together, rocking beside each other and laughing our asses off on a porch somewhere.

Lisa’s friendship had begun to heal me.

How the hell could I abandon her now?

I flipped the page and it felt like a sword had pierced my heart as it opened to reveal a photo of me, Lisa, Aisling, and Liath. Arms slung around each other’s necks, wide grins, the tops of our shoulders already turning pink.

It was summer and we’d all gone out sailing on Liath’s parents’ boat off the coast of Greece.

Liath stared out at me with her gray eyes so full of life with a dimple in her cheek and white-toothed laugh.

My blood turned to ice when I imagined her pupils frosted over with death. Her tanned skin covered in dirt and worms. Her cheeks sunken and mouth frozen forever in a silent scream.

Lying in an unmarked grave with no one to grieve for her.

Unwanted images of her moments before death flashed through me, lighting my body with cracking forks of terror. My heart ached as if I could feel her hurt echoing inside me as I imagined all she might have suffered.

No one else was looking for her.

No one else believed that she hadn’t just run away.

Liath deserved for everyone to know what happened to her. She deserved her story to be told.

Liath deserved justice.

And if I were to leave, she’d never get it. And I would have to live with that fact every day.

Could I live with the guilt of abandoning her—abandoningeveryone—and becoming another “missing girl”?

But the more I dug, the more I cut open Liath’s dark secrets, the more my own vile truths would keep surfacing. I couldn’t expose Liath’s mystery without ripping my own open.

I didn’t want to know any more.

I didn’t want to remember.

Now that I’d been forced a taste, I didn’t want to have to swallow down the full bitter poisonous truth.

I didn’t know if I’d survive it.

My eyes drifted to the open backpack and the piles of bright summer clothes that I’d laid around it in piles.

Didn’t I deserve to be happy? Here my childhood best friend, my foster brother was promising to take me away, to look after me always.

To fill my days with sunshine and laughter and to fill my nights with pleasure.

Toloveme.

And I loved him.

I froze, this thought hitting me like a sledgehammer.

I loved him.

I loved my Scáth.

I always had.

I loved him when he was my best friend. And I even loved him when he was my bully.

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