Page 78 of Carry on Wayward Son

The silence stretched. Koa whined.

“Because my dad, my siblings—they’re not my blood family.” Her voice stayed quiet and completely without self-pity. “They’re the family I made after. The family I chose.”

It landed the way truth landed. Not as a revelation, because I’d already suspected the shape of it, but as confirmation—a piece clicking into the frame and the frame becoming a picture.

I sat with that for a moment before continuing. “Who is Halston Ashmore to you?”

She blinked. “Who?”

She was good at dissemination, but I didn’t see any tells that she recognized the name.

“The man you were looking at at the party. Who is he to you?”

I saw the fear try to take hold again, the full body response she worked to contain, and I didn’t make her answer it. I kept going.

“I’ll tell you who he is to me. A rich, entitled jackwipe. And also a fraternity brother of mine. One who was out of school for a big chunk of a semester recovering from a car crash. That’s what they told us. And when he came back, he had a bunch of scars. We didn’t ask about it, because of course you don’t do that. Not of the frat president. He graduated my sophomore year, and I didn’t give him another thought until we uncovered his connection to the island in those property records. But he’s been stuck in my brain ever since, and I couldn’t figure out why. Until tonight. Until you. Because you know what I think, Layla? I think you know something about those scars on his face. I think he knows something about the scars on your hands and arms. How am I doing?”

I didn’t need her to answer. I saw it in the way she held herself together, the effort of it, the expression of someone who’d been carrying something alone for a very long time and now stood at the edge of being able to put it down.

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, something had shifted. The exhaustion of the long hold finally winning out over the instinct to keep it locked down.

“I was bought for him.” Her voice was level and distant in a way I recognized from Willa, when she separated herself from the content of what she was saying in order to survive the saying of it. “A present. A plaything. A pet. Something he could use or abuse at his whim. He made that very clear when I was presented to him.”

Something cold moved through my chest and lower to curdle in my gut, and I held myself completely still lest the rage and horror spill over.

“He picked me specifically, out of all the others. I was kept crated for weeks.” The same flatness, the same distance. She was somewhere else while she said it, some internal room she’d built for exactly this purpose. “Treated like an animal. He had a knife and liked to threaten me with it. He believed he was wearing me down until I’d be compliant.”

I remembered the dog crate at the shelter and the way she’d gone white. I held all that inside me, keeping my face open. Listening.

“I was busy breaking off a piece of the wire crate.” Something shifted in her voice then, the first hint of the person who’d been in that cage rather than the person narrating it from a distance. “It wasn’t huge. A section of heavy gauge wire, maybe four or five inches long. Not much of a weapon, but it was all I could access.” A pause. “And I knew he was getting impatient. So the next time he came, I acquiesced. Promised to behave if only I could get out and stretch my legs. Shower. He smiled this triumphant smile and came to let me out, knife in hand.”

I was going to find him. That thought struck me with a clarity and coldness that I recognized as the place I went when things got very simple. I set it aside. Not now. Now I needed to keep listening.

“I saw it. Knew what he’d likely do to me if I missed. But this was my one shot. I was getting weaker by the day, and anything was better than staying in that cage.” She looked at her hands, at the scars running from the knuckles toward the wrists, at the botanical ink that had grown over and around them. “When he opened the door and his guard was down, I struck. I went for his eye and missed by a little. Tore open his cheek. He was furious and came after me with the knife.” She stopped. “I don’t remember much after that. I didn’t feel the cuts on my arms. I just kept fighting, hitting whatever I could with the wire. Eventually, he dropped the knife. I managed to grab it and turned it on him.” A long pause. “When I left that house, I was certain he was dead. Because I knew if I didn’t kill him, I’d never be free.”

The sound she made lived in the same neighborhood as a laugh and had nothing in common with one. “I’m still not free. If I’d known he was still alive—if I’d known I could run into him—I would never have come back here.”

I stood very still for a long moment.

Twelve years of doing the work I’d done. Twelve years of following the architecture of operations like the one that had produced Halston Ashmore, tracking the money and the networks and the men at the top of them and handing the intelligence to people with the jurisdiction to act on it. I’d understood the machinery abstractly and operationally and in every way that the work required me to understand it.

I had never stood in a room with someone who had survived it and listened to them tell me what it had actually cost. Not like this.

I crossed to her. Slowly, so she saw me coming, so there was nothing sudden in it. I raised my hand and held it near her face for a moment, giving her the chance to move away, and when she didn’t, I cupped her cheek carefully in my palm.

She was warm. She was here. She was looking at me with eyes full of exhaustion and terror and something else beneath all of it. Something that had been there for weeks and that I was only now understanding the full weight of.

“But you couldn’t stay away from your real life any longer, could you, Gwen?”

Forty

LAYLA

I closed my eyes.

Fourteen years. Fourteen years since anyone had said that name to me, and even then it had been clinical—social workers, lawyers, the FBI agent who would become my father walking me through what came next, his voice careful as he laid out what my life would look like from that moment forward. Even Bruce never called me anything but my established cover name. Nobody had said it the way Jace said it. Nobody had said it like it was simply who I was, like it was something that belonged to me rather than something I was forced to leave behind.

I should be falling back on denial. Every protocol, every survival instinct I’d spent years carefully constructing and reinforcing was screaming at me to backpedal, to manufacture confusion, to give him something that closed the door and locked it from the inside. I was good at that. Deflection was nearly automatic, the way breathing was automatic, the way checking exits when I walked into a room was automatic.