Page 117 of Hunted

They knew I went to some backwoods emergency department and needed IV fluids because of a severe case of food poisoning back in 2018.

They even knew about the night I punched a guy so hard he needed stitches when he tried his luck in a dark alley on my way home from work.

My stomach somersaulted. Did they know about my home too?

I clicked the tab labelled family, hesitating for longer than I should have considering the circumstances.

My next breath caught in my throat. My heart stuttered to a stop.

No.

Plastered across the top of the page were my parents' names. Their real names—not the fabricated couple I told the intake officer about when Blackwing first brought me in.

FAMILY: Genevieve St. Clare (biological

mother). Marcus St. Clare

(biological father—positive DNA

confirmation)

STATUS: Dead

NOTES: Shrike protocol activated

Confirmed dead 03/03/2008

Key unrecovered

“What the fuck?” I whispered aloud, terrified for what else they knew.

What else I would discover.

Shrike protocol?

That could only mean one thing: that someone had hired the Academy to carry out the assassination of my parents, and they could only do so using brute force. Butcherbirds murdered my parents… not a car crash like I’d been told.

I clicked back over to the personnel tab, this time scrolling all the way to the bottom. Below my intake information, someone had attached several more clickable documents. Bulk selecting and opening them, I flicked through attachment after attachment of increasingly damning evidence.

Tears streamed freely down my face by the final page, and that was exactly how Dr. Calper found me.

I didn’t even hear her return—barely even registered the door opening.

I blinked slowly, my heartbeat hammering in my ears as time moved in slow motion.

She was saying words I didn’t care to unmuffle, approached the desk, withdrawing a syringe from her jacket pocket. Someone else moved through the doorway, but that no longer mattered.

My whole life was a lie.

A fabricated puppet show in which I was the marionette and everyone around me was either pulling my strings in different directions to serve their own agendas—or cutting them, one by one.

Just as Calper rounded the corner, intending to stick me with whatever sedative was inside that needle, time sped back up. I shot to my feet and slid the dagger Beck had only given me this morning from inside my boot in one smooth motion.

In another, I dragged it across the doctor’s neck, then used her dying body as a human shield while the doorway man popped off all the rounds in his pistol.

The second that gun clicked empty, I dropped her, staring coldly at her bodyguard.

Oh, this is too perfect.