The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(58)

Gun. Someone’s shooting at us. There was a stabbing pain in my chest. I’ve been shot.

I heard footsteps beating against the forest floor, and then Oren yelled, “Stay down!” Weapon drawn, my bodyguard put himself between us and the shooter. A small eternity passed. Oren took off running in the direction the shots had come from, but I knew, with a prescience I couldn’t explain, that the shooter was gone.

“Are you okay, Avery?” Oren doubled back. “Jameson, is she okay?”

“She’s bleeding.” That was Jameson. He’d pulled back from my body and was looking down at me.

My chest throbbed, just below my collarbone, where I’d been hit.

“Your face.” Jameson’s touch was light against my skin. The moment his fingertips skimmed lightly over my cheekbone, the nerves in my face were jarred alive. Hurts.

“Did they shoot me twice?” I asked, dazed.

“The assailant didn’t shoot you at all.” Oren made quick work of displacing Jameson and ran his hands expertly over my body, checking for damage. “You got hit by a couple of pieces of bark.” He probed at the wound below my collarbone. “The other cut’s just a scratch, but the bark’s lodged deep in this one. We’ll leave it until we’re ready to stitch you up.”

My ears rang. “Stitch me up.” I didn’t want to just repeat what he was saying back to him, but it was literally all my mouth would do.

“You’re lucky.” Oren stood, then did a quick check of the tree, where the bullet had hit. “A couple of inches to the right, and we’d be looking at removing a bullet, not bark.” My bodyguard stalked past the place where the tree had been hit to another tree behind us. In one smooth motion, he produced a knife from his belt and jammed it into the tree.

It took me a moment to realize that he was digging out a bullet.

“Whoever fired this is long gone now,” he said, wrapping the bullet in what appeared to be some kind of handkerchief. “But we might be able to trace this.”

This, as in a bullet. Someone had just tried to shoot us. Me. My brain was finally catching up now. They weren’t aiming for Jameson.

“What just happened here?” For once, Jameson didn’t sound like he was playing. He sounded like his heart was beating as rapidly and viciously as mine.

“What happened,” Oren replied, glancing back into the distance, “is that someone saw the two of you out here, decided you were easy targets, and pulled their trigger. Twice.”





CHAPTER 53


Someone shot at me. I felt… numb wasn’t the right word. My mouth was too dry. My heart was beating too fast. I hurt, but it felt like I was hurting from a distance.

Shock.

“I need a team in the northeast quadrant.” Oren was on the phone. I tried to focus on what he was saying but couldn’t seem to focus on anything, not even my arm. “We have a shooter. Gone now, almost certainly, but we’ll sweep the woods just in case. Bring a med kit.”

Oren hung up, then turned his attention back to Jameson and me. “Follow me. We’ll stay where we have cover until the support team gets here.” He led us back toward the south end of the forest, where the trees were denser.

It didn’t take the team long to arrive. They came in ATVs—two of them. Two men, two vehicles. As soon as they pulled up, Oren rattled off coordinates: where we’d been when we were shot, the direction the bullets had come from, the trajectory.

The men didn’t say anything in response. They drew their weapons. Oren climbed into the four-seat ATV and waited for Jameson and me to do the same.

“You headed back to the House?” one of the men asked.

Oren met his subordinate’s eyes. “The cottage.”





Halfway to Wayback Cottage, my brain started working again. My chest hurt. I’d been given a compress to hold on the wound, but Oren hadn’t treated it yet. His first priority had been getting us to safer ground. He’s taking us to Wayback Cottage. Not Hawthorne House. The cottage was closer, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that what Oren had really been saying to his men was that he didn’t trust the people at the House.

So much for the way he’d assured me—repeatedly—that I was safe. That the Hawthorne family wasn’t a threat. The entire estate, including the Black Wood, was walled in. No one was allowed past the gate without a thorough background check.

Oren doesn’t think we’re dealing with an outside threat. I let that sink in, a heaviness in my stomach as I processed the limited number of suspects. The Hawthornes—and the staff.





Going to Wayback Cottage felt like a risk. I hadn’t interacted with the Laughlins much, but they hadn’t ever given me the impression that they were glad I was here. Exactly how loyal are they to the Hawthorne family? I thought about Alisa saying that Nash’s people would die for him.

Would they kill for him, too?

Mrs. Laughlin was at home when we arrived at Wayback. She’s not the shooter, I thought. She couldn’t have made it back here in time. Could she?

The older woman took one look at Oren, Jameson, and me and ushered us inside. If a bleeding person being stitched up at her kitchen table was an unusual occurrence, she gave no sign of it. I wasn’t sure if the way she was taking this in stride was comforting—or suspicious.