Page 201 of Hunting Pretty

I wrenched at my arm and finally my hand slipped free from the ropes.

I reached out to snatch his skeleton mask off his face. But my movements were already slow from whatever he’d drugged me with.

He caught my wrist with his strong iron fingers.

A realization struck me like a battering ram.

I thought over all the times I saw him from a distance with his mask on. I thought my skeleton-masked stalker was Scáth—because who the fuck hastwostalkers?

But he wasn’t.

Scáth said he thought someone else was following me. He thought it was Cormac, but it wasn’t.

It was this cold, cruel figure before me. Hiding in plain sight all along.

I have asecondstalker.

“Youarethe High Lord,” I spluttered, my head spinning with betrayal.

He said nothing, confirmed nothing, denied nothing. Just a cold statue glaring back at me.

He didn’t have to.

He was the High Lord of this secret society.

And I was now at his mercy.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, trying to snatch my arm from his grasp. But he was viciously strong and I could not break free. “What do you want with me?”

But I would get no answers. Because whatever he’d injected me with worked quickly. I felt it pull me under like I had weights tied to my ankles.

I had two last thoughts before I passed out.

I’d been saved from death.

There were far worse things than death.

THE WARDEN

Ava was more beautiful than I remembered, more than my memory could ever do justice.

The weight of it all—the lost time, the regret, the longing—hung around me, so thick I could almost reach out and touch it.

I felt something in me crack, that iron grip I’d held over my heart splintering as I stood there, staring at her like she was something out of a dream.

I hadn’t let myself hope, hadn’t let myselffeelin so long, but seeing her again right in front of me like this… knowing that she was finallymine… God, I couldn’t stop it.

I was completely undone.

I watched as Ava fell asleep, her pretty eyes fluttering shut, her head lolling forward at last.

She was so fucking beautiful. Even in this wretched place with her legs crooked like a broken doll’s on the filthy mattress, her hair tangled with leaves and dirt and matted against her moist brow.

The glare of the exposed lightbulb made her skin lookpale. But her lips were strawberry red, parted just slightly, the delicate cupid’s bow above the pouty lower lip just begging for me to lick it, her breath coming in quiet exhalations.

They looked exactly as I remembered them from when I used to watch her sleeping.

The temptation to touch her then just like now had always been a torment, the agony of holding myself back like needles under my fingernails.

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