Page 19 of Hunting Pretty

I slammed my palm down on the arm of my chair, making Lisa flinch. “Liath was being stalked.”

Lisa made a choking noise as she sank away from me. “W-what?”

I launched myself out of my chair, unable to sit still anymore.

I paced the cluttered office, weaving around the haphazard layout of desks and chairs, the floorboards creaking underfoot.

I told Lisa about the message Liath had left me days ago, about her stalker.

I told her about the feeling I’d gotten lately that I was being watched.

Finally, I told her about the man who’d broken into my bedroom, although I left out the part where I covered for him with Ebony’s bodyguard and that he made me come.

I told Lisa everything. Well, mostly. But I wasn’t ready totalk about it yet. I hadn’t even figured out what the hell had happened and how I felt about it.

When I finished talking, a heavy silence descended over the chilly office, the only sound the faint hum and occasional rattle of the overworked radiator. This tower had no insulation so even in summer it was cold.

I stood by the window and stared out at the woods beyond, the thick gray sky feeling more oppressive than ever.

Darkmoor was Ireland’s oldest college and had been modeled after Oxford and Cambridge in the UK.

The campus was huge, stretching across the west of Dublin city until the Darkmoor woods tangled with the Farmleigh forest.

Somewhere out there was Liath.

The floorboards creaked as Lisa came to stand next to me. “Why do you think he took her?”

I tried not to imagine all the terrible things someone could do to a young girl.

Darkness flashed across my mind and I felt sick to my stomach. I shook my head to shake off those images. “I don’t know.”

I leaned into Lisa’s warmth, pressing my arm against hers, a comfort she accepted by wrapping her arm around my waist.

Her breath condensed against the single pane of glass. “Those woods are so creepy.”

I traced two eyes into the fog on the window. “Have you ever thought about all the places out there to hide girls? To make them disappear?”

Lisa shuddered. “Shit, Ava. Stop talking like that.”

“These woods are so big that you could go walking in them and never come out. And remember the old campus buildings they abandoned during the Spanish flu? There’s even an old passage tomb out there somewhere, you know?”

I remember the thrill that had gone through me when I’d huddled in the orientation tour as a freshman and the tour guide, a lanky third year had mentioned the ruins and passage tomb deep in the woods on campus.

I had asked for directions.

His face had contorted and his fingers wriggled as he warned me not to enter the woods, claiming that evil creatures of the night haunted them.

Then he had straightened and said in a brusque voice, in all seriousness, that those old ruins were now structural hazards and likely to collapse andnotever to be entered.

It had made me sad to hear that those once grand structures had been reclaimed by the woods, crumbled into haunted relics in mere ghost stories and urban legend.

Standing at this high window, staring out over the dark tangle of forest, it made me wonder if there was some truth to those stories.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, an awareness skittering over my skin.

Someone was watching.

I gazed out toward the edge of the woods, tracing the line of it until my gaze rested on a dark figure with familiar broad shoulders and a menacing stance.

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