Page 77 of Carry on Wayward Son

Not a sound. Not a movement. Something in the air pressure.

I’d made a career of reading rooms, and part of that was reading the people you trusted at your side, knowing their baseline well enough that a deviation registered before you understood the why of it. Layla’s baseline was contained and watchful, with the steady, even breath of someone who had learned to keep the body from telegraphing the mind. That breath changed subtly.

I’d spent countless hours memorizing her face in concentration, in worry, in fury, in passion. What I saw now was all her careful control running at full capacity and straining. Something underneath was leaking out, not visible to anyone who hadn’t been watching her for weeks. Visible to me.

I tracked her line of sight across the room.

A man in his late thirties, champagne in hand, worked the crowd with the practiced ease of a host who owned the room he stood in. Halston Ashmore. I’d last seen him the spring of my sophomore year when he graduated. He’d looked different by then, the scars from the reconstruction work mostly settled, the story about the car accident already filed and forgotten by everyone, including me. He looked different again now. More complete, somehow. The kind of maintenance that happened when you had unlimited resources and enough vanity to use them to continue to erase imperfections.

His gaze was fixed on Layla with the look of a man whose attention had been snagged by something fascinating, and he intended to keep looking until he understood what it was.

Every hair on my body stood up as I remembered where I’d seen that look before.

This was a mistake. Everything about tonight had been a mistake. She was in danger.

I didn’t think after that. Thinking was too slow. Shifting my weight into her space, I dropped my head toward her ear, keeping my voice so low it was barely sound at all. “I’ve got you. We’re getting out of here.”

She exhaled one single controlled breath, and then I turned us both with the smile I put on when I wanted people to draw a particular conclusion, saying something to the couple nearest us about making an early night of it in the tone that made early night mean something specific, and I got us moving toward the door at the pace of two people with somewhere better to be.

I kept my hand at the small of her back and felt her working to stay loose under my palm, all that training keeping her body from doing what it wanted to do. I kept my face easy and my eyes on the room and got us out.

On the drive back, I watched the mirrors, taking a circuitous route even though on an island this small it would take next to no effort for someone to get the information on where she was staying. Nothing obvious behind us, no headlights that followed through both turns, no car that appeared twice. Either I was overreacting, or whoever was following was professional enough not to be visible. I didn’t know yet which of those was true, so I kept checking.

Beside me, Layla looked straight ahead and said nothing. I heard her teeth chattering, saw the tremble in her shoulders as her control slipped enough to let some of the fear bleed out, and I cursed myself eight ways from Sunday for having taken her with me and put her at risk.

As soon as we reached the cottage, I hustled her inside and immediately locked the door. Koa was right there to greet us. He took one glance at her, and his whole manner shifted to the focused attention and press of his working posture. Her fingers curled into his fur automatically, but still she shook.

“Protège-la,” I ordered Koa.

His ears flicked toward me, but his focus stayed on Layla.

I forced myself to methodically clear the cottage, checking that the front and back doors and every single window were locked. I dropped and closed every blind in the place to limit the sightline of anyone outside. When I’d done the full circuit, I filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and brought it to her where she still stood in the entryway.

She drained it.

“We didn’t have to leave so early.” Her voice was careful. Composed.

“I got what I needed.”

She didn’t ask what that was. She looked at the empty glass in her hands, and I watched her decide not to ask.

“C’mon.” Gently, I nudged her toward the living room and the sofa. “Sit.”

She collapsed more than sat, her shoulders curled in a self-protective posture I absolutely hated. Koa leapt up beside her, draping across her lap. She didn’t quite meet my eyes as I studied her face. It was more than simply discomfort with me seeing her vulnerability.

The picture had been building in my mind for weeks, and I’d let myself avoid completing it because completion meant asking, and asking meant she’d have to answer or refuse to, and either way something would change that I hadn’t been ready for.

I wasn’t sure I was ready now.

“I need to ask you something.”

She swallowed. “What?”

“Why isn’t there a file about your case?”

She stilled.

“There’s no missing persons report. No record of a girl taken from anywhere up the coast that matches your description in the right window of time. And you said your dad is in law enforcement. You have siblings. You have people.” I kept my voice even, the voice I used when I needed someone to stay with me rather than run from what I was saying. “That means you aren’t one of the ones who slipped through the cracks like the others. So why is there no case file for you, Layla?”