4. Ava

AVA

C ome on, Liath, pick up.

The ringtone sounded from my phone at my ear as I climbed the last few circular stone steps to the very top of the tower in an old building on Darkmoor campus.

My Chanel kitten heels echoed in this stone stairwell, my fingertips cold on the mossy stone, light filtering in from the notched windows that looked like places that archers would stand.

Darkmoor campus was old. Like over five hundred years old.

I read somewhere that when they established the school, they’d reclaimed several buildings of an old sprawling castle on these grounds.

So literal archers probably did stand at those windows centuries ago.

I shivered, the air always colder up here, as Liath’s voice came over the speaker telling me to leave a message .

Just like it had every time I tried to call over the last two days since I got her terrified message.

“Dammit, Liath.”

I ran my fingers through my long dark hair. Did I even remember to brush it this morning?

Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your phone?

I hung up and threw my phone in my large tote, my stomach churning as I shoved open the door to the Dark Diaries newspaper office, the familiar scent of old books, ink, and freshly brewed coffee doing nothing to calm my nerves.

Maybe Aisling had heard from her?

If not, I would head to her house after classes today. Even though—I repressed a shudder—her father creeped me the fuck out. Not that I’d ever admit that to Liath.

Amid the gray circular stone walls covered in black-and-white newspaper clippings, scratched-out notes, and yellowing maps of Dublin, the wild curly mess of red hair of my best friend and fellow Dark Diaries collaborator stood out like a flame.

“Hey, bish,” I called out as I dropped my bag at my rustic wood desk, its polish worn away in matching elbow patterns.

Lisa spun in her creaky office chair to face me as I shrugged off my coat and set it over the back of my threadbare chair.

“Lis, have you heard from—?”

The look on Lisa’s face stopped me in my tracks.

Even under the thin light from the bare bulbs hanging above and the mismatched floor lamps, her skin was so pale and ghostly that even her freckles seemed to have disappeared.

Her eyes and cheeks were hollowed, her palms flat on the desk scattered with papers, her slender arms trembling as if they were the only things holding her up.

I rushed over to her, brushing back a strand off her clammy forehead. “Christ, what’s wrong?”

It was only after I’d lowered her into the corner armchair bristling with tufts of frayed thread and shoved a chipped mug of tea in her shaking hands that she was able to speak.

She took a sip of tea and stared into the rising steam. “I just got off the phone with Mrs. Byrne.”

Liath’s mother.

Ice trickled down my spine.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

The whites showed all around Lisa’s moss-colored pupils as she stared up at me. “Liath’s missing.”

“W-what?” I sank down into the chair next to her, the rusted legs giving out a loud creak as Liath’s terrified voice echoed in my mind.

“I’m being stalked. And he’s coming for me!”

Lisa continued, her voice warbling. “She never came home two nights ago. She’s just… gone. Ran away.”

My stomach curdled and I felt like I was going to throw up.

Liath hadn’t run away. She’d been taken by her stalker.

Fuck. I should have done something other than just call her repeatedly over the last two days. I should have told someone.

Maybe I could have stopped it .

The memory of my own intruder flashed in my mind, hazy as if it were a dream. His piercing eyes boring into mine were dangerous and intense… but was he evil?

Could they be the same person? Could the intruder watching me also have been stalking Liath?

Lisa clutched my hand, her fingers still warm from her tea mug, now sitting forgotten on a stack of books by her chair. “I can’t believe she’s run away.”

“No, I don’t believe it.” I shook my head so hard that strands of my long dark hair fell into my eyes. “Liath did not run away.”

“I know it’s hard to believe, Ava, but the police have been to her house and—”

I slammed my palm down on the arm of my chair, making Lisa flinch. “Liath was being stalked.”

Lisa made a choking noise as she sank away from me. “W-what?”

I launched myself out of my chair, unable to sit still anymore.

I paced the cluttered office, weaving around the haphazard layout of desks and chairs, the floorboards creaking underfoot.

I told Lisa about the message Liath had left me days ago, about her stalker.

I told her about the feeling I’d gotten lately that I was being watched.

Finally, I told her about the man who’d broken into my bedroom, although I left out the part where I covered for him with Ebony’s bodyguard and that he made me come.

I told Lisa everything. Well, mostly. But I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. I hadn’t even figured out what the hell had happened and how I felt about it.

When I finished talking, a heavy silence descended over the chilly office, the only sound the faint hum and occasional rattle of the overworked radiator. This tower had no insulation so even in summer it was cold.

I stood by the window and stared out at the woods beyond, the thick gray sky feeling more oppressive than ever.

Darkmoor was Ireland’s oldest college and had been modeled after Oxford and Cambridge in the UK.

The campus was huge, stretching across the west of Dublin city until the Darkmoor woods tangled with the Farmleigh forest.

Somewhere out there was Liath.

The floorboards creaked as Lisa came to stand next to me. “Why do you think he took her?”

I tried not to imagine all the terrible things someone could do to a young girl.

Darkness flashed across my mind and I felt sick to my stomach. I shook my head to shake off those images. “I don’t know.”

I leaned into Lisa’s warmth, pressing my arm against hers, a comfort she accepted by wrapping her arm around my waist.

Her breath condensed against the single pane of glass. “Those woods are so creepy.”

I traced two eyes into the fog on the window. “Have you ever thought about all the places out there to hide girls? To make them disappear?”

Lisa shuddered. “Shit, Ava. Stop talking like that. ”

“These woods are so big that you could go walking in them and never come out. And remember the old campus buildings they abandoned during the Spanish flu? There’s even an old passage tomb out there somewhere, you know?”

I remember the thrill that had gone through me when I’d huddled in the orientation tour as a freshman and the tour guide, a lanky third year had mentioned the ruins and passage tomb deep in the woods on campus.

I had asked for directions.

His face had contorted and his fingers wriggled as he warned me not to enter the woods, claiming that evil creatures of the night haunted them.

Then he had straightened and said in a brusque voice, in all seriousness, that those old ruins were now structural hazards and likely to collapse and not ever to be entered.

It had made me sad to hear that those once grand structures had been reclaimed by the woods, crumbled into haunted relics in mere ghost stories and urban legend.

Standing at this high window, staring out over the dark tangle of forest, it made me wonder if there was some truth to those stories.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, an awareness skittering over my skin.

Someone was watching.

I gazed out toward the edge of the woods, tracing the line of it until my gaze rested on a dark figure with familiar broad shoulders and a menacing stance.

I tried to suck in a breath, but it felt like there was a hand around my throat.

He stood among the trees. Motionless.

It was my intruder .

His head was tilted to one side. Like he was curious. Like he’d found a toy, a plaything, and he wasn’t sure whether he would mend it. Or whether he liked it better broken.

I couldn’t make out his features. From the high turret, his face was a smear of pale paint on a black palette.

But I knew it was him.

I wasn’t crazy.

He was real.

And he was looking at me .

The unbidden memory of him spearing my pussy with his fingers slammed through me.

Need spread through my belly, radiating out to my limbs.

At the same time, anger flared in my chest, mixing with my lust, spreading through me like wildfire, my pulse pounding so hard it felt like my body might burst.

This bastard took Liath.

“That’s him!” I pushed back off the sill and raced across the office. “He took Liath.”

“What?” Lisa called out behind me. “Who are you talking about?”

I ignored her as I barged out of the office, taking the stone steps two at a time as I raced down to the ground.

I didn’t even think that I might need a weapon until I tumbled out the side door and ran around the corner of the arts building to where the edge of the woods stood.

My breaths heaved in and out of my lungs and I clung to the side of the cold mossy stone wall, staring at the spot that my intruder stood.

He’d gone.

If he was ever there.

“I’m telling you,” I slammed my palm on the dean’s antique desk, “Liath didn’t run away. Someone took her.”

Dean McCarthy, the head of Darkmoor college, seemed unaffected, staring back at me from his leather armchair, his fingers templed together in front of his weak chin. The only emotion emanating from him was the slightest purse of his thin lips and the narrowing of his watery eyes.

Damn him. He didn’t believe me.

I turned to the garda commissioner, sitting to my left in a high-backed, ornately carved wooden chair, with one ankle resting on his fleshy knee.

“ You believe me, don’t you?”

Commissioner O’Neill cleared his throat and brushed some invisible crumbs off his impeccably pressed uniform studded with shiny gold buttons. “Ms. McKinsey—”

“Ava,” I interrupted, bristling at his formality.

“Right. Ava.” The commissioner smoothed down his white handlebar mustache and spoke slowly as if I was a wild mare he was trying to placate. “I understand that losing a friend is very upsetting but—”

“Stop treating me like I’m some hysterical woman,” I snapped.

“Ava,” Ebony admonished from the other seat next to me.

Her sharp frown fit her features: angular cheekbones, a severe black bob, and pale eyes the color of hydrangea macrophylla, a delicate pale blue .

Unlike the two men, she looked a decade younger than her mid-forties, only the beginnings of fine lines in the delicate skin around her eyes.

I sank back in my chair, my cheeks hot, as the commissioner traded a look with the dean.

These two very important men were only here in the dean’s large high-ceilinged office listening to me because Ebony knew them from college and called in a favor.

And I was embarrassing Ebony.

Ebony cleared her throat, immediately getting the attention of the two men, a strained smile pulling at her rose-tinted lips. “Gentlemen, my daughter isn’t prone to flights of fancy.”

She called me her daughter.

A small thread of guilt weaved through me. Even after she officially adopted me, even after living with her for over five years, I still couldn’t call her mother .

Ebony placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me an awkward pat that I guessed was meant to be reassuring. “If Ava has reason to believe that Liath didn’t run away, then we need to at least listen to her.”

I shot Ebony a grateful look and turned back to lock gazes with the commissioner.

“I know Liath,” I pressed. “She wouldn’t run away.”

The silence grew heavy, the only sounds the ticking of the elaborate grandfather clock in the corner and the faint sound of a lawn mower.

The dean’s office overlooked the main college green in Regent’s Hall, an imposing Georgian building near the main Darkmoor entrance.

This imposing office was lined with bookshelves and adorned with rare artifacts from around the world, gifts to the long line of esteemed Darkmoor deans from wealthy, diverse alumni.

There were ancient tribal masks, stuffed exotic birds, and several coats of armor in a glass-paneled display case.

The dean sighed, took off his round glasses, and began polishing them. “I’m sorry, Ava, but we have it on good authority that Liath was… doing illicit drugs.”

I glanced between the faces of these two old white men.

Okay, so Liath had been partying more the last few months.

But we were college students for God’s sake.

We all drank too much, had sex, and experimented with drugs.

Drugs didn’t turn us into runaways.

I licked my lips. “So?”

The dean peered through his lenses and placed them on his face as casually as if we were discussing the fucking weather and not the disappearance of one of my fucking friends.

“We understand that she wasn’t… dealing with things lately.”

“What things ?” I demanded, my voice echoing off the high ceiling.

The dean pursed his thin lips, his gaunt cheeks appearing even more sunken. “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

“My men did a thorough investigation, Ava,” the commissioner added, balancing his service cap on his lap and mopping his sweaty pink forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. “I oversaw it personally, the Byrnes being close personal friends of mine.”

“But— ”

“Her toothbrush and clothes were missing, as was her phone and wallet.” The commissioner set his cap back on his head and folded the handkerchief into his front pocket lined with shiny medals.

He continued. “Mr. Byrne discovered that several thousand euros worth of cash had gone missing from his office safe. Only he, Mrs. Byrne, and Liath knew the code. And neither he nor Mrs. Byrne took that money.”

“That doesn’t mean she ran away,” I insisted.

“That’s enough, Ava.” The commissioner’s voice grew hard, as if he’d entertained my delirium for long enough.

He sank back into his chair and counted on his fingers as he listed out all the reasons why I was wrong.

“There were no signs of forced entry, no signs of struggle, her car was found abandoned near Heuston station.”

The commissioner let out a sigh, his plump chin wobbling. “I’m sorry you can’t accept that Miss Byrne ran away, but those are the facts. Case closed.”

I stewed in my chair, my skin feeling itchy, my hands tightened into fists by my sides.

Liath didn’t run away.

She was taken.

I was wound up so tight that I jumped when Ebony placed her hand on my shoulder.

She shot me a gentle smile and I forced myself to relax.

“Ava, darling, do you have any evidence that something happened to Liath other than her running away? Other than your gut feeling?”

Stupid, Ava, of course. Why didn’t I think of it before?

“Yes!” I snatched my carryall leather Hermès bag off the floor and rummaged through it .

Half-empty pill bottles and scrunched-up notes rattled around against the soft goatskin leather lining.

God, I needed to clean out this bag.

I pawed through a side pocket. There!

I pulled out my phone and set it on the dean’s desk. “Liath left me a voice message the day of her disappearance. And I have never heard her so terrified.”

The dean pushed aside his papers and sleek laptop and leaned forward on his elbows. Even the commissioner leaned forward in his chair.

Finally, I had their attention.

I opened up my saved voicemails and lined up her voicemail.

“Here, she was being… well, listen for yourself.”

I pressed play and sat back, folding my arms and glancing expectantly between the three faces all peering down at my glittery pink phone.

My speaker crackled.

But that’s all it did.

Just seconds of crackling.

I frowned and sat back up. “Hang on, maybe I didn’t line up the audio properly.”

I grabbed my phone, pressing buttons, refreshing and playing it again.

Again, the speaker just let out a long crackling noise.

“No!” I stabbed at the buttons now, my fingers mashing against the glass. “Her message… it was here. I swear it.”

“Ava…” Ebony’s hand fell upon my arm.

I shrugged it off as I rummaged through my phone’s trash folder. Had I somehow accidentally deleted it?

But no. I hadn’t .

“I swear, Ebony,” I said. “Liath was being stalked. She was terrified. She said he was coming for her.”

I returned to my voice messages, praying that it had been some sort of glitch the first time.

I opened her voice message again.

And hit play.

But nothing played from my phone speakers except for the eerie sound of static.

Liath’s voice message had disappeared.

No. My stomach knotted so tightly it felt like my insides were twisting in on themselves, a sickening churn rising with every breath.

It hadn’t disappeared.

Someone had deleted it.