Watch Me (Last Stand #3)(95)
Author: Brenda Novak

Just to be sure, he sent Koda down, but the dog came right back up.

“Nothing?”

Koda whined and led him to the front door. So Cain whistled to stop Quixote and Maximillian from searching the cabin. If Sheridan was there, they would’ve found her already. Which meant she had to be in the forest.

With a whistle, he sent the dogs into the trees and ran behind them.

Only a few seconds later the report of a gun echoed against the night sky.

Sheridan was hit, but she’d knocked Owen off balance and the bullet had merely grazed her arm. She felt the sting as she shoved him. She wanted to run, but she couldn’t see well enough to avoid the trees. Her only chance was to stand and fight. Knowing she couldn’t stop him with her bare hands, she sank to her knees and groped for a weapon.

Owen fired again, but it was a random, desperate shot. She couldn’t tell where the bullet had gone. She could sense him aiming lower, however, and knew the next one would hit her if she didn’t somehow get out of the way.

Covering her head, she somersaulted to the right as the gun went off. The sound, so close, made her ears ring. But her hands finally landed on a broken branch and she came up swinging.

He stumbled and fell when she hit him. She heard him cry out as he sprawled on the ground. But she didn’t back off. As long as his breathing or movement gave her a target, she swung her club and managed to hit him one more time.

He must’ve dropped his gun in the scuffle because the next thing she knew he was wrestling with her. But she could hear dogs in the distance. Cain was coming. She was going to live, she told herself. She was going to make it—if she could hold out long enough.

Owen noticed the beam of light before he heard the dogs. That was strange. Sheridan must’ve hurt his hearing when she hit him with the club he’d finally wrested away from her. Or he was hyper-focusing again. Now that she was lying limp on the ground, however, he couldn’t miss the dogs.

They circled and yelped and had no trouble seeing in the dark. Owen thought it might help that they knew him, thought he’d be able to talk to them, calm them down. But it didn’t help as much as he hoped. He’d never been good with animals, and they were more riled than he’d ever seen them—probably because of Cain’s panic when he’d found the cabin empty. And the blood, the blood they could smell on Karen and on his clothes.

Dogs were so damn smart, especially Cain’s dogs.

Owen shouted for them to get back and began swinging the club Sheridan had used on him, but the aggression worked against him. The lead hound—was it Quixote?—lunged and latched on to his ankle. But he didn’t bite very deep. Even though the dog’s senses told him to fight he was confused; he’d been familiar with Owen for years—and he didn’t yet know what Cain wanted him to do.

Kicking free, Owen scrambled to find his gun. He was going to need it to go up against Cain.

Cain was close now, the beam of his flashlight brighter, more blinding. Once again Owen couldn’t hear the dogs, even though he knew they were still barking. He’d found his gun and all his attention was focused on moving it slowly behind his back.

“You’re too late,” he said as soon as Cain reached him. Actually, he was guessing it was Cain because of the dogs, but he couldn’t see the looming figure well enough to identify him.

The beam of Cain’s flashlight swept over the ground, and stopped at Sheridan. Then, for the first time in Owen’s life, he heard a sound of true agony from his stepbrother—and grimaced. Cain was usually better at hiding his feelings. Owen had always admired that about him. This grief was distasteful, made him seem so…weak.

“Sorry,” he said. “But she was a problem.”

The muzzle of a rifle appeared in the light. But Owen wasn’t worried. He wanted Cain to shoot. He’d known it might come down to this, because there wasn’t any way he’d let them take him alive. He wasn’t going to prison; he wouldn’t last a day there.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Shoot. I strangled her with my bare hands. I killed Karen, too, in case you didn’t see the mess back at the cabin. You wouldn’t believe what she did. I had to shoot her while I was driving. Crazy, huh? We spun around and nearly crashed down the mountain. But I got everything under control.”

He knew the pride in his voice would provoke Cain, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“Pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you, Owen?”

“Most people would’ve gone off the cliff. Or let her get away.”

“You’re not as clever as you think,” Cain said. “Dad knows.”

This bothered Owen. He told himself it shouldn’t. His father had never really loved him, not like he’d loved Jason. But it’d been a lot of work establishing his reputation. And now it was gone. Just like that. “I’m sure you’re happy he knows it wasn’t you,” he said. “It makes you look oh-so-good by comparison, doesn’t it? But he’s never going to love you. Jason was the only one of us who mattered to him. And that didn’t change after he was gone.”

“You need help, Owen,” Cain said.

“I think it’s a little late for that, don’t you?” Lifting the gun, he managed to squeeze off a round. Cain was close enough that it should’ve killed him—and would have, if not for Koda. The dog had leaped toward Owen the moment he sensed the threat, and the bullet struck him instead. He fell to the ground with a whine. And, almost simultaneously, Cain’s rifle went off.

There was a deep hole, and she was at the bottom of it. Sheridan could hear Cain calling her name, but she couldn’t seem to rise to the surface, to break free of the darkness.

“I love you. Come back to me,” he said. And she fought harder. She could make it. She was a survivor.

With supreme effort, she opened her eyes to see him standing over her. She was in the hospital again; she recognized the wallpaper.

“Oh, no,” she murmured. “What happened to me this time?”

Cain looked pale beneath his tan, but he smiled. “You were out doing your superhero shit again. You’ve really got to stop that.”

She tried to laugh, but her head hurt too much. “Am I as badly beat up as the last time?”

“No. The doctor says you should be able to go home with me tomorrow.”

Surprised, because she felt as banged up as ever, she managed to lift her hands to her face. “What are these bandages hiding?”