Catching Pretty (Lovely Broken Doll #2)

18. The Shadow

THE SHADOW

I slammed my palm on my desk as the satellite image took its sweet fucking time to load, my breath coming too fast, too shallow. Come on, come on.

Ava wasn’t in the basement. Dr. Vale had said she’d be there, that she hadn’t been moved yet. But he lied. Or he didn’t know .

The High Lord had her now. The bastard who’d, at best, kill her—at worse…

And if I didn’t find her soon…

No. I couldn’t think like that. Couldn’t let the panic swallow me whole. But it was clawing at the edges of my mind, trying to tear through my control.

I had to stay focused. Had to get ahead of them before it was too late.

Finally, the aerial map of the Darkmoor campus flashed up on one of my many screens.

I located the clearing in the woods with the stone tower where Dr. Vale had led me. From there, I spotted the service road, which was the one I’d taken .

My car’s tires tracks, melting away in the rain, had been the only tracks on the road I’d used.

But I’d discovered two more sets of tracks.

One leading to Cormac’s car, hidden around the other side of the building.

And a second, leading through a small dirt track, the overgrown bushes partly hiding it.

On my aerial map, I zoomed in on this second path, smaller and overgrown, where the Society’s tire tracks had disappeared down.

I traced it along, sometimes losing it as it was nothing more than a faint impression among the treetops, until it exited onto a small side road.

My hands trembled as I hacked into the city’s traffic cameras, tapping into the grid of Dublin’s network.

It wasn’t the first time I’d done this, but never with stakes this high. Every second that passed was one second closer to losing her.

Normally, it would take me less than a minute to get in. This time it took just over five.

I was rushing. Too emotional, near panic. I wanted Ava back too badly. It made me sloppy.

Finally…

I found a traffic camera on a light at the nearest intersection to the side road. I could just see the mostly hidden exit from Darkmoor forest.

My already thumping heart began to race even faster as I rewound the footage to the time just after Ava left me at Dr. Vale’s office.

But even with speeding up the tape, the process was agonizingly slow .

My foot bounced uncontrollably against the leg of the chair and my skin felt like it was on fire. I scratched constantly at the back of my neck, rubbed at my burning eyes till they were raw, and drummed my fingers on the desk till the sound drove me mad.

My skin prickled as a black sedan pulled into the rain-soaked intersection on the video feed.

I sat up, my heart thudding in my chest as I squinted at the two figures in the car. Was that Ava in the passenger seat?

I paused it and zoomed in. I couldn’t see the passenger’s face, but they appeared to be sleeping.

Ava was in that sedan. I knew it.

I’ve got you, rabbit. Hang on. I’m coming.

I couldn’t see the face of the man driving. He was nothing more than a shadow behind a rain-speckled windshield, wearing a baseball cap pulled down low under a black hood, concealing his face from any cameras, most likely on purpose.

I couldn’t shake the cold dread from the base of my neck.

They were a pro. They knew someone— me —might be coming for them.

But who ? Who was this High Lord?

I was used to wild swings of emotion. Passion and lust, anger and fury. But those were the kind of emotions that burned the blood. This inescapable cold was new to me: fear .

This Society was bigger than me. And what was most frightening was that they seemed to want Ava just as much as I did .

I was going to go after her. I was never going to stop. I was going to sacrifice everything to find her. I’d burn down the world to get her back.

But I couldn’t shake off that sickly chill as I continued to stare at the hidden figure on my screen.

It might not be enough.

I looked up the license plate in the police database, hoping, praying that this High Lord was arrogant and used their own car. That my search would give me a name and an address.

Shit. The vehicle had recently been reported stolen.

Guess they were smart enough to cover their tracks. I could only hope I was smarter. Or at least more desperate.

The world was full of too much pain and evil to stop it all. No one could be expected to take that on their shoulders. Women would always disappear.

But they’d made one fatal mistake.

They’d taken mine .

Using the traffic cameras, I followed the black sedan, tracing its path through the streets as it made its way out of the city.

My stomach dropped as the black sedan merged onto the main highway that connected Dublin to the rest of Ireland.

There were dozens of exits and offramps. Hundreds of possible destinations. The chances of tracing the sedan using traffic cameras became next to impossible. It was like looking for a needle in a hundred different haystacks.

This left me with only one last option: hacking into the black sedan’s GPS.

Most people didn’t realize their cars had GPS trackers built into their navigation systems. Manufacturers said it was for safety. I planned on turning that against them.

I started by running the car’s make and model against the database of known GPS systems. Then using the plate number, I hacked into the network.

Every second I spent at that keyboard, I pictured what might be happening to Ava. My hands were shaking, my breath coming out in uneven bursts.

Focus. Stay on task.

But self-control had never been my strong suit. Sweat slicked my skin, dripping down my forehead as my fingers flew over the keys. I clenched my jaw, fighting the urge to smash the keyboard into the wall and watch it shatter.

When I finally cracked into the black sedan’s GPS, my body was running on fumes.

I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten—hell, I didn’t even know when I’d last showered. The stench of my own sweat clung to me, but I didn’t care. None of it mattered. Not compared to this.

The locator blinked on the screen, a single pin on the outskirts of Dublin. An abandoned mansion.

I leaned closer, my pulse thudding in my ears. I found you. And now I had an address.

Hang on, Ava. I’m coming.

On the open highway, I willed the engine faster as I pictured arriving too late, finding Ava’s battered body submerged in some murky pond, the rain splattering her cold, blue lips.

The engine screamed against my ears and the countryside whipped past without me seeing it as I neared the locator pin .

I nearly sent the car flipping side over side when I took the turn between some overgrown weeds. The tires lifted and crashed heavily back down onto an unpaved road lined with trees whose shadows were like mangled limbs in my hurtling headlights.

It was madness to push the car even faster on that uneven, pothole-riddled road, risking a broken axle, but I didn’t care. I’d carry Ava back to Dublin in my arms if I had to.

The rusted gates that came into view were open and I accelerated through them without hesitation. Ava was somewhere at the end of this drive.

I could see little else than the throbbing blue locator pin on my phone and the second of clear windshield after the wipers cleared it before the droplets flooded back in.

I braked with such violence at the end of the drive that my seat belt choked off my breath and tore viciously at my throat. Gravel flew up from the tires and the car slid all the way to the base of the wide stone steps.

I lurched painfully back against the seat and gasped for air as the windshield wipers lashed against the downpour.

I was at a sprawling mansion whose farthest wings disappeared into the early dusk among low-hanging clouds. A large set of double doors were illuminated in the headlights before me.

I checked the screen of my phone as the rain hissed and popped on the overheated hood. I had arrived at the location of the pin.

I stepped out into the rain with my hand on the knife at my hip I’d named Dantès.

My eyes scanned the weed-infested drive. Another flash of lightning illuminated a set of tire tracks flooded with water. Beneath a dead oak, I spotted the black sedan.

Ava was here.

This was the place.

If I had time to think things through, I may have chosen stealth as my entry strategy. But I was mad with desperation. I was being careless. I just had to hope I—or Ava—wouldn’t pay for it.

The door of the mansion fell from its rusted hinges as I kicked it in. A billow of choking dust rose in the darkness. The beam of my flashlight cast my shadow long across a marble floor littered with dried leaves which scuttled like rats in the sudden rain-slashed gust of wind.

My heavy boots echoed in the vacuous space. I looked up in the center of the foyer and drops of rain fell from a hole in the ornate stained-glass ceiling, splashing onto my cheeks and eyelids. The cold seeped down into my entire body.

Where was Ava?

Just a few steps up the wooden grand staircase the boards creaked and moaned, threatening to give way if I pressed farther.

I retreated. It would have been impossible for someone to carry a limp body up those stairs without crashing through.

I investigated each room down the hallway on the first floor, kicking open every door with a cloud of dust.

A strike of lightning revealed chandeliers shattered on the floor and molding furniture covered in torn shrouds of plastic .

But I found no sign that anyone had been inside for years.

No High Lord.

No Ava.

My breath caught painfully in my chest and I lowered my gun.

No. But this is where the GPS had led me…

Fear crept into my mind. The silence of the empty mansion pressed against my ears. Had I underestimated my opponent? Was he clever enough to change vehicles? To use this as a decoy location?

My faceless enemy grew larger among the shadows.

I raced back through every room, just in case I’d missed something. I couldn’t afford to panic, but I felt its cold grip closing in around my racing heart.

But the truth was inescapable; Ava was gone.

By the time I got back to Dublin and pulled up on Dr. Vale’s street, the fire trucks were already there, the street blocked off by yellow tape.

Firefighters swarmed the house like ants, and smoke billowed from the roof in thick, black clouds, staining the gray sky above.

Bastards . The Society was covering their tracks, scrubbing any trace of evidence I might’ve uncovered.

Everything that could’ve tied them to Liath’s disappearance, to Ava, was gone.

I’m too late .

The flames were licking away every secret, every lie within Dr. Vale’s house.

But they’d miscalculated. They thought they’d burned it all, but they hadn’t.

Because I had one thing. One lead.

I had the foresight to grab Liath’s video—the one marked Insurance —and it was more than enough to turn the tide.

I knew who Dr. Vale had been protecting.

I knew who had hurt Liath. And he was going to learn what real fear felt like.

He thought he could bury his secrets. But monsters like him had no idea what real monsters looked like.

I wasn’t going to stop until I had every answer. Until I had him.

And this time, I wasn’t playing by anyone’s rules but my own.

I just had to hope it wasn’t too late.