Page 52 of Claiming Pretty

Ciaran reached for the remote, pausing the footage just as I directed. I pointed toward the edge of the screen, my pulse spiking as I spotted him.

A man.

“He’s watching her. Look at him. He’s not just looking—he’s studying her.”

He was standing partially hidden in the shadows, his gaze fixed on Liath. He didn’t move, didn’t interact with anyone around him. His attention was solely on her, his posture unnervingly still.

The way he stared at Liath, as though she were the only person in the room, sent a chill down my spine.

Ciaran leaned in, his arm brushing against mine as he studied the screen. “Who the fuck is that?”

I squinted but I couldn’t make out his features from this angle.

“Can you get a better shot of his face?” Ty said.

Ciaran picked up the remote and flicked across what appeared to be several camera angles.

He landed on one from a different side of the bar, facing the man.

Something tickled my memory. I grabbed Ciaran’s knee. “Can you zoom in?”

With a press of a button, he did, the man’s face filling up the TV.

He was handsome, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with sharp cheekbones and an unsettling intensity in his expression.

I gasped.

“France!” I yelled out and was met with blank stares from both brothers.

God, it was unnerving to have them both sitting side by side and looking at me with the same expression.

I explained, my words tumbling out in a rush. “I was with Liath and the girls in the south of France at this sailing thing. This guy was staring at her all night at this club wewent to. We were trying to get her to go talk to him ’cause he was cute. But…”

My words faltered, the memory of our last holiday together flooding my mind like a cruel specter.

It had been the last time I saw Liath.

My gaze locked on the man’s face frozen on the screen, and a shiver coursed down my spine.

“I swear that’s him,” I whispered, my voice barely audible over the tension in the room.

Images of that holiday flashed through my mind—laughing with Liath, teasing her about her obsessed crush. We’d joked about him, made light of the way he seemed to linger just out of reach, his attention glued to her.

But it hadn’t been funny. Not really.

The icy realization hit me like a blow to the chest. He hadn’t been a crush—he’d been stalking her. Watching her every move. He’d followed her to France and then back to Dublin; there was the fucking proof.

He had been stalking her for months and she hadn’t known it. Not until it was too late.

Hehad taken her.

My stomach twisted violently, the weight of guilt crushing down on me as I stared at the screen.

If only I’d known.

If I’d looked closer, paid more attention, I could have stopped it. I could have done something.

I turned to Ciaran. “Can you run his face through, I don’t know, facial recognition or something? Find out who he is?”

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