Page 30 of Hunted

Maribel looks up when I pass. Her glare is still in place, but her face is tighter. Paler.

She already knows.

Come to think of it, everyone in the office looks on edge, casting me glances as I stride to the elevator, punch the button a few times, then call fuck it and hurtle down the stairs.

By the time I get home, my pulse has settled into something controlled and lethal.

I triple-lock the door. Check the cameras. Drop wards the way Selphine taught me to.

Then I sit at the table and open the file.

Lyra Hannigan stares back at me from the first page.

There’s no photograph because I paid a hefty fee to a dark web hacker to erase every last one before I disappeared, and from the look of it, I succeeded.

So this file is just data.

Precise. Clinical. Astonishingly complete.

There are birth records, school transcripts, medical notes. Psychological evaluations by people I’ve never met. Financial trails that luckily went cold. Addresses. Dates.

Everything.

I flip pages with shaking hands as my past is laid bare in ink and analysis. Every alias I used before I knew how to erase myself. Every scrap of jewellery I sold quietly, piece by piece, after my mother died. The antique ring. The necklace she wore every day. The earrings my father never noticed were gone.

Then I see a note about the mole on my upper thigh. The one I had lasered off with my third pay cheque.

I stare at it until my vision blurs.

He knew everything about me then, or has gathered every scrap since. Knows me down to the smallest, most intimate details.

The next section makes my stomach drop.

Subject’s father: Declan Hannigan.

A timeline follows, starting four months after Valentin’s visit. One month after I fled.

A week-long celebration binge at expensive hotels and casinos. Credit extended where it shouldn’t have been. Debts multiplied instead of paid. He bragged. Drank. Blabbed to anyone who would listen that he’d secured the deal of a lifetime.

By selling his daughter to the most powerful vampire in New York.

Four weeks later, Declan Hannigan was found dead in an alley behind a private club.

Cause: violent assault by several assailants.

I sit very still.

There’s no burial location. No picture of a grave. No marker.

I blink back tears before they can fall, anger and grief tangling too tightly to separate. I didn’t know where he was buried and I never dared ask. Never went back to my mother’s grave to find out if he lay beside her.

I was too afraid someone would be watching. Too afraid standing still long enough to grieve would get me caught.

I press my palm to the table and breathe through it.

He sold me. And I still loved him.

That’s the part that never stops hurting. The part I’ve spent years trying to cut out without killing everything else along with it.