“Mr. Hawthorne rarely took me into his confidence,” Oren told me. “I didn’t always know how his mind worked, but I respected him, and that respect was mutual.” Oren removed a cloth from a drawer and unfolded it, spreading it across the table’s marble top. Then he walked over to the cabinet I’d opened and lifted out one of the rifles.
“None of them are loaded,” he said intently. “But you treat them like they are. Always.”
He laid the gun down on the cloth and then ran his fingers lightly over the barrel. “This was one of his favorites. He was one hell of a shot.”
I got the sense that there was a story there—one he’d probably never tell me.
Oren stepped back, and I took that as my cue to approach. Everything in me wanted to shrink back from the rifle. The bullets that had been fired at me were too fresh in my own memory. My wounds still throbbed, but I made myself examine each part of the weapon, looking for something, anything, that might be a clue. Finally, I turned back to Oren. “Where do you load the bullets?”
I found what I was looking for on the fourth gun. To load a bullet into a Winchester rifle, you cocked a lever away from the stock. On the underside of that lever, on the fourth gun I looked at, were three letters:O. N. E.The way it had been etched into the metal made the letters look like initials, but I read it as number, to go with the one we’d found on the bridge.
Not infinity, I thought.Eight. And now: One.
Eight. One.
CHAPTER 58
Oren escorted me back to my wing. I thought about knocking on Libby’s door, but it was late—too late—and it wasn’t like I could just pop in and say,There’s murder afoot, sleep tight!
Oren did a sweep of my quarters and then took up position outside my door, feet spread shoulder-width apart, hands dangling by his side. He had to sleep sometime, but as the door closed between us, I knew it wouldn’t be tonight.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stared at it. Nothing from Max. She was a night owl and two hours behind me time zone–wise. There was no way she was asleep. I DM-ed the same message I’d texted her earlier to every social media account she had.
Please respond, I thought desperately.Please, Max.
“Nothing.” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Trying not to feel utterly alone, I made my way to the bathroom, laid my phone on the counter, and slipped off my clothes. Naked, I looked in the mirror. Except for my face and the bandage over my stitches, my skin looked untouched. I peeled the bandage back. The wound was angry and red, the stitches even and small. I stared at it.
Someone—almost certainly someone in the Hawthorne family—wanted me dead.I could be dead right now.I pictured their faces, one by one. Jameson had been there with me when the shots rang out. Nash had claimed from the beginning that he didn’t want the money. Xander had been nothing but welcoming. But Grayson…
If you were smart, you’d stay away from Jameson. From the game. From me.He’d warned me. He’d told me that their family destroyed everything they touched. When I’d asked Rebecca how Emily had died, it hadn’t been Jameson’s name she’d mentioned.
Grayson told me that it was her heart.
I flipped the shower on as hot as it would go and stepped in, turning my chest from the stream and letting the hot water beat against my back. It hurt, but all I wanted was to scrub this entire night off me. What had happened in the Black Wood. What had happened with Jameson.All of it.
I broke down. Crying in the shower didn’t count.
After a minute or two, I got ahold of myself and turned the water off, just in time to hear my phone ringing. Wet and dripping, I lunged for it.
“Hello?”
“You had better not be lying about the assassination attempt. Or the making out.”
My body sagged in relief. “Max.”
She must have heard in my tone that I wasn’t lying. “What the elf, Avery? What the everlasting mothing-foxing elf is going on there?”
I told her—all of it, every detail, every moment, everything I’d been trying not to feel.
“You have to get out of there.” For once, Max was deadly serious.
“What?” I said. I shivered and finally managed to grab a towel.
“Someone tried to kill you,” Max said with exaggerated patience, “so you need to get out of Murderland. Like, now.”
“I can’t leave,” I said. “I have to live here for a year, or I lose everything.”
“So your life goes back to the way it was a week ago. Is that so bad?”
