I knew from the map roughly where the Black Wood was. I found Jameson on the outskirts, standing eerily still, like he couldn’t move. Without warning, he broke that stillness, punching furiously at a nearby tree, hard and fast, the bark tearing at his hands.
Thea brought up Emily. This is what even the mention of her name does to him.
“Jameson!” I was almost to him now. He jerked his head toward me, and I stopped, overwhelmed with the feeling that I shouldn’t have been there, that I had no right to witness any of the Hawthorne boys hurting that much.
The only thing I could think to do was try to make what I’d just seen matter less. “Broken any fingers lately?” I asked lightly. The Pretending It Doesn’t Matter Game.
Jameson was ready and willing to play. He held his hands up, grunting as he bent them at the knuckles. “Still intact.”
I dragged my eyes from him and took in our surroundings. The perimeter was so densely wooded that if the trees hadn’t already shed their leaves, no light would have been able to make it to the forest floor.
“What are we looking for?” I asked. Maybe he didn’t consider me a real partner in this hunt. Maybe there was no real we—but he answered.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Heiress.”
All around us, bare branches stretched up overhead, skeletal and crooked.
“You skipped school today to do something,” I pointed out. “You have a guess.”
Jameson smiled like he couldn’t feel the blood welling up on his hands. “Four middle names. Four locations. Four clues—carvings, most likely. Symbols, if the clue on the bridge was infinity; numbers, if it was an eight.”
I wondered what, if anything, he’d done to clear his mind between last night and entering the Black Wood. Climbing. Racing. Jumping.
Disappearing into the walls.
“Do you know how many trees four acres can hold, Heiress?” Jameson asked jauntily. “Two hundred, in a healthy forest.”
“And in the Black Wood?” I prompted, taking first one step toward him, then another.
“At least twice that.”
It was like the library all over again. Like the keys. There had to be a shortcut, a trick we weren’t seeing.
“Here.” Jameson bent down, then placed a roll of glow-in-the-dark duct tape in my hand, letting his fingers brush mine as he did. “I’ve been marking off trees as I check them.”
I concentrated on his words—not his touch. Mostly. “There has got to be a better way,” I said, turning the duct tape over in my hands, my eyes finding their way to his once more.
Jameson’s lips twisted into a lazy, devil-may-care smirk. “Got any suggestions, Mystery Girl?”
Two days later, Jameson and I were still doing things the hard way, and we still hadn’t found anything. I could see him becoming more and more single-minded. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne would push until he hit a wall. I wasn’t sure what he would do to break through it this time, but every once in a while, I caught him looking at me in a way that made me think he had some ideas.
That was how he was looking at me now. “We aren’t the only ones searching for the next clue,” he said as dusk began to give way to darkness. “I saw Grayson with a map of the woods.”
“Thea’s tailing me,” I said, ripping off a piece of tape, hyperaware of the silence all around us. “The only way I can shake her is when she sees an opportunity to mess with Xander.”
Jameson brushed gently past me and marked off the next tree over. “Thea holds a grudge, and when she and Xander broke up, it was ugly.”
“They dated?” I slid past Jameson and searched the next tree, running my fingers over the bark. “Thea is practically your cousin.”
“Constantine is Zara’s second husband. The marriage is recent, and Xander’s always been a fan of loopholes.”
Nothing with the Hawthorne brothers was ever simple—including what Jameson and I were doing now. Since we’d worked our way to the center of the forest, the trees were spread farther apart. Up ahead, I could see a large open space—the only place in the Black Wood where grass was able to grow on the forest floor.
My back to Jameson, I moved to a new tree and began running my hands over the bark. Almost immediately, my fingers hit a groove.
“Jameson.” It wasn’t pitch-dark yet, but there was little enough light in the woods that I couldn’t entirely make out what I’d found until Jameson appeared beside me, shining an extra light. I ran my fingers slowly over the letters carved into the tree.
TOBIAS HAWTHORNE II
Unlike the first symbol we’d found, these letters weren’t smooth. The carving hadn’t been done with an even hand. The name looked like it had been carved by a child.
“The I’s at the end are a Roman numeral,” Jameson said, his voice going electric. “Tobias Hawthorne the Second.”
Toby, I thought, and then I heard a crack. A deafening echo followed, and the world exploded. Bark flying. My body thrown backward.
“Get down!” Jameson yelled.
I barely heard him. My brain couldn’t process what I was hearing, what had just happened. I’m bleeding.
Pain.
Jameson grabbed me and pulled me toward the ground. The next thing I knew, his body was over mine and the sound of a second gunshot rang out.
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.”
