Page 74 of Hunting Pretty

I made him spell them out and wrote those three compounds down in my notebook.

I tapped my chin with my pen. “Okay science guy, once again for the non-nerd, if I’m dosed with this drug, what happens to me?”

“Ava, this combination…” He let out a curse. “Your muscles would all freeze. You’d be able to hear, see, and feel but you couldn’t move, a prisoner in your own body. But worse of all, when it wore off, you’d have no memory of what happened to you.”

The realization hit me like a punch to the gut. Liath—drugged with a paralytic. My hands shook as I pieced it together, the horror creeping up my spine.

Liath would’ve been trapped inside her own body, unable to move, unable to fight back. The thought made me sick to my stomach.

I could almost feel the fear she must’ve felt, the panic that would’ve set in when she realized she couldn’t escape. My chest tightened, and my breath hitched.

“Curare comes from a vine in South America and has been used as a poison for centuries by the local tribespeople.” Seamus kept going on and on about the compounds and where they were sourced, but I’d stopped listening.

My friend, frozen, helpless, while I was oblivious. My mind raced, trying to grasp the full weight of it.

Liath would have experienced a mind-shattering horror, then forgotten about it.

She’d wake up and not remember the trauma she’d suffered, walking around andseeingthe twisted fuck who did that to her and not remember.

Who dosed her? And why?

My blood boiled, rage simmering beneath the surface, but beneath that was guilt—a suffocating guilt. How did I miss it? How had none of us seen the signs?

What did they do to Liath while she was paralyzed? What did they do to her that she couldn’t remember?

Seamus’ words cut through my thoughts. “…Belladonna Lily and Spiders L—”

“What?” I straightened, picking up the lily off my bedside table that my stalker had left for me, the lily I’d used to get off earlier. “Say that again? What about the Belladonna Lily?”

“It’s a source of Lycorine.”

One of the drug compounds.

A poison compound.

My stalker was leaving lilies for me which contained the same compound as the drug I found in Liath’s bedroom.

I dropped the lily and it rolled off the side of the bed and fell to the floor at an angle, crushing its petals so they lay broken and limp.

My mind wouldn’t stop spinning.

The lilies—the same lilies the drug was made from—he’d left them for me, carefully placed beside my bed like some kind of sick gift. Why would he do that?

My throat tightened, my stomach twisting into knots as I stared at the evidence, the truth screaming at me, but I didn’t want to listen.

He drugged Liath. Could he?

I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to accept that the same man who had saved me from Cormac, who had hidden me from the Byrnes’ butler, could be capable of something so twisted.

But the lilies… why the hell would he leave me the exact same flowers that created the compound?

My chest ached with every breath, torn between the cold, harsh facts right in front of me and this illogical feeling in my chest. He couldn’t be both, could he? A protector and a monster?

But what kind of person leaves a trail of clues that link them to something this dark?

My mind fought against itself, trying to find a way out, some explanation that didn’t end with him being responsible for Liath’s suffering.

But the evidence was right there. He was dangerous.

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