Page 57 of The Hunt

I called Tessa, and she answered on the sixth ring, her voice thick with what sounded like exhaustion. “Hello?”

“Hi. Where are you? I can hear you, but I can’t see you.”

“Huh?”

“Where are you?” I repeated.

“In bed.” She let out a brief yawn. “I was asleep.”

My heart began to pound as confusion swirled in my mind. “But you asked me to come to the library, didn’t you? I literallyjustheard your voice.”

“Babe, I’ve been in bed for like, two hours. I know it’s really early for me, but I have to get up at five to study for this stupid quiz tomorrow, or else I’ll totally fail.”

I blinked, wondering if I’d lost my damn mind. “So you didn’t send me a bunch of voice notes about Jake?”

“No.” She let out a groan and went on. “Oh my god. Someone’s totally trying to scam you. You’ve heard about that stuff, right?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Apparently scammers are using deepfake tech to copy real people’s voices. That way they can call their friends or family and ask for money. People fall for it all the time.”

“They didn’t ask for any money,” I muttered, switching the call to speakerphone so I could look at the messages. “And it came from your account.”

“It wasn’t me. Seriously. It must be some kind of scammer rip-off thing. They probably got my voice from all the reels I post and made a fake account. Just tell them to fuck off.”

I clicked into the profile that had contacted me. It had Tessa’s current profile picture and identical bio details… but we had zero mutual friends, and there were no photos or reels posted.

“Oh my god. You’re right,” I said, voice barely above a whisper. “It’s fake.”

“See? Tell them to fuck off.”

I didn’t reply right away. My mind was spinning too much, telling me I needed to get the hell out of this courtyard right now.

Clearly, this whole thing was a setup. The fact that the ‘deepfake scammer’ had pretended to be Tessa saying she wanted to come up with a big master plan to take down Jake… that meant it had to be Jake himself.

He knewexactlyhow to lure me into a trap—by cunningly preying on my desire to destroy him—and he’d correctly assumed that I’d told my friends about the things he’d donein order to craft a narrative that would draw me to the exact location he wanted me in.

Fuck.

I sprinted toward the side door of the library, praying I’d reach the safety of the building in time. As I ran, Tessa’s voice echoed faintly from the phone. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to get back to sleep,” she was saying. “Talk tomorrow?”

“Tessa, call the pol—”

A big hand clamped over my mouth, cutting off my words. My phone slipped from my fingers, clattering to the ground as I thrashed, desperate to break free from the grip of the person wrapping themselves around me.

“Shh,” a masculine voice murmured behind me, low and calm, as if soothing a frightened animal.

My heart slammed against my ribs as the sharp sting of a needle pierced the side of my neck. Panic flared, white-hot and wild, but it was short-lived. Whatever was in the syringe worked fast, spreading like fire through my veins, making my limbs heavy and useless.

I tried to fight, to wrench myself free, but my body wouldn’t obey. The edges of my vision blurred as my knees buckled, and I felt myself being lowered to the ground as darkness rushed in to claim me.

The last thing I registered was the sound of Tessa’s voice on my phone, a distant murmur in the dark before everything went silent and black.

13

Everly

I wokewith a groggy heaviness clinging to my limbs, like my body was made of lead. My head throbbed faintly, a dull ache behind my eyes, and my mouth was dry and sticky. There was a strange vertiginous sensation in my head too, like the world around me was swaying, though I quickly realized the feeling wasn’t just in my head.

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