Page 58 of Hunting Pretty

It may have been my imagination, but I could swear I could see a shadow slinking across the garden.

He was gone.

I should go, too.

But my eye caught on Liath’s large four-poster bed as I turned to leave.

I hadn’t checked her bed yet.

Her black currant sheets were unmade, her blankets kicked down to the foot of the bed as if she’d just gotten up out of it.

But the sheets were cold when I ran my hand across it, smoothing out the wrinkles.

There was nothing caught in her sheets or slipped underher pillows.

I remembered that time I’d lost my phone for a whole day. It’d slipped behind the wall and the bed, an easy place for things to get lost in.

I slipped my fingers back in between the frame and the mattress searching for… I wasn’t sure what.

My fingers caught on a loose piece of material.

I tugged out a rag the color of dirty bathwater that had a faint smell.

I sniffed it.

It was sharp, medicinal, and slightly sweet.

The smell was… familiar.

I tried for a moment to recall the memory of the scent, but it was like grasping at air. There was something there, but I had no hope of holding on to it.

I tore a spare page out of the notebook by her bedside and folded the rag into it before slipping it into my pocket.

I went to leave but I kicked something that clanked and rolled under the bed. I dropped to my knees and peered underneath, using my phone as a flashlight.

I grabbed the small cylindrical object and held it up to the light.

It was a glass vial with a screw-on cap, the kind that drugs came in.

I opened the lid and sniffed.

It was the same smell as the rag but stronger, thanks to the tiny amount of liquid at the bottom.

Why would Liath have a drug vial and a soaked rag in her bedroom?

Was she using drugs?

Or had she been drugged?

THE SHADOW

Naughty girl. Bad, bad Ava. She wasn’t heedinganyof my warnings.

She just kept investigating Liath’s disappearance. Kept pushing. Kept poking around in places that she shouldn’t poke.

I would have todosomething about it.

She’d brushed off my threats so far.

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