Page 202 of Hunting Pretty

I pulled off a glove and tucked a strand of her soft dark hair behind her ear, a tremor traveling down my spine at that simple touch.

The first time I’d touched her inyears.

All this time that I’d been watching.

Waiting.

Planning.

And now she wasmine.

I ran my finger along her cheek, the softness of her skin stunning me, then down the side of her neck.

Her pulse wasn’t strong, but it was steady.

There was bruising around her neck from that asshole’s hands. I traced the purple skin with trembling fingers before my hand curled into a fist.

These marks would fade.

Ava’s deeper marks, her deeper trauma, would take more care to heal.

Cormac Foley.

Fucking errand boy.

I regretted not drawing out his death, making it more painful.

If he wasn’t dead already, I’d bruise him. A hundred bruises for every single mark he’d left on her.

My dark imagination relished in the fantasy of cutting off his fingers, one by one, and stuffing his holes full of them.

That’d teach him to touch Ava.

No one touched Ava.

Except forme.

Or perhaps I’d string his fingers onto a necklace and make him wear it.

I shoved those thoughts aside.

He wasn’t the one I was here for. He wasn’t the one for whom I had a plan.

But I had time to send one last message.

I slipped a small knife from its holster at my ankle. I flipped it in the air as I stalked toward Cormac’s corpse.

I had bigger knives. But this smaller knife would give me the finesse my larger butcher knives wouldn’t.

I kneeled beside Cormac’s corpse, his eye open and blank, his mouth frozen in a final silent scream.

Someone had beat me to his first eye.

But the second was all mine.

Warm blood trickled over my fingers as I carved it from its socket, my blade sawing through the taut tendons like butter and pulling out the squishy globe.

I admired the horror-filled eye in my palm like a ghoulish Halloween prop.

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