Page 110 of What Lies in the Woods

Cody nodded, giving her a tight smile, and stepped between the two of us. “Hold on, there’s one more thing we should check,” he said, turning toward her.

“What now?” she snapped, in the half second before he raised the gun and fired a bullet through her throat.

Cass’s body collapsed instantly, dead weight. The mist of blood hung in the air longer, drifting down with the rain as the gunshot faded. A scream lodged in my closed-off throat.

Cody lowered the gun.

He turned toward me.

“She was a monster,” he said, but the words didn’t penetrate at first. I was still in the moment of the gunshot.

I took a startled breath. I wrenched my gaze away from Cass’s body, tried to think through the fog of horror. My mind was filled with the image of the instant the bullet struck. The look on her face—she hadn’t even had time to be surprised.

“Yes. She was,” I croaked out. She was a monster. She was my best friend. She was dead on the ground and the dirt was stained dark beneath her.

“She hurt you. It was her all along. She did that to you. All that blood—how could she do that to you?” he asked, face contorted in disgust.

I worked my throat, trying to speak. “You saved me,” I whispered.

I saw it: The way I lived. The way I walked out of these woods. He didn’t want to hurt me. He wanted absolution. He wanted me to kiss his brow and tell him that I understood, that I would keep my silence, that I would save him the way he had saved me.

“You saved my life. Just like you saved me from Oscar. You’ve always been my protector,” I told him, getting slowly to my feet.

I slipped my feet out of my high heels. The tarp was cold and slickunder the soles of my feet. Cass’s body lay only a few feet from where I stood. Blood still bubbled from the ragged hole beneath her chin. “Cass did this. She did all of it, but you stopped her. Do you understand?”

It took him a moment. There were freckles of blood on the knuckles of the hand that held the gun. He stared at them. “We could pin it on her.”

“She could have killed Liv. And when I found out, she was going to kill me. But you stopped her. It all fits. Simple. She’s the one who put all of this in motion. You were as much her victim as anyone,” I said. Cass’s hand shivered with the last electrical pulses of a dying body, but she was gone—her eyes empty, her blood stilled. It was just the two of us, and the gun.

He closed his eyes. His breath plumed in the air, and for a moment I could feel it, the fantasy shared between us—that we would walk out of here, and everything would be okay.

Then Cody shuddered and opened his eyes, and I saw the moment the fantasy shattered. The moment he realized that he couldn’t protect both me and himself, and made his choice. “Naomi,” he said softly. “I wish I didn’t know what a liar you are.”

I had lived twenty years and change in a body that knew how to survive when the world turned against it. All the sights and the sounds and the sensations of that day were a hopeless slurry, but survival—that, my body remembered. Without the confusion of hope and trust to muddle things, it remembered it perfectly.

I launched myself off the tree before he finished talking, knocking into him. He went sprawling in the dirt. I scrambled forward, clawing the ground before getting my feet under me.

I ran straight forward, not daring to spend the time to turn back toward the road. Distance would save me. Handguns aren’t accurate at long range. Not in the hands of an unskilled shooter. Not with the evening darkness gathering swiftly around us.

Fifty yards and I’d be safe, I told myself, and I knew these woods. Justrun.

The first shot hit a tree trunk with an explosion of bark. The second zipped somewhere overhead.

The third shot was the lucky one.

People always asked me what it felt like to get stabbed. Turned out it felt a lot like getting shot. The impact first, not the pain, a punch to the back that took my legs out from under me. I collapsed as Cody tramped toward me. I lay still, facedown. It didn’t hurt. Adrenaline, I thought. The adrenaline was masking it. The pain would find me soon. It knew me too well not to find me. But maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe it wouldn’t have time.

Cody reached me. He stood over me, panting. “Goddammit, Naomi,” he said. He knelt down and grabbed my shoulder. I held my breath, which was easier than breathing, anyway. I didn’t like what that said about what the bullet might have hit.

I stayed limp as he flipped me over.

“Fuck,” he said. There were tears in his voice. It was getting harder to hold on to the world. I risked opening my eyes to slits. He was looking away, wiping at his face with his sleeve.

“Dammit,” he whispered again.

He was crouching down. The gun was in his right hand, resting on his knee. His grip on it was loose. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to leave without making sure that I was dead. And the pain was coming now, around the edges of that blessed numbness that the galloping adrenaline brought with it.

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