Page 83 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Here,” Sawyer said without hesitation.

“I don’t want to put you and Willa in danger by being here.”

“At this point, we’re all probably in danger just from being involved,” Sawyer said. “And Sutter House is a far more defensible position than a rental cottage in the village.”

The thing I’d been holding down all night rose up at that. The thing I’d been afraid of since the moment I decided to come back to this island. “I shouldn’t have come back.” My voice wasn’t as steady as I wanted it. “If any of you gets hurt because of me—if I brought this down on you⁠—”

Jace moved. He crossed to me and took both my hands. The warmth of his grip cut through the spiral before it could fully take hold.

“None of us would have stopped looking. Not ever. Not one of us. With you or without you, this group was going to keep pulling on this until we found the truth. So as far as anyone outside this room knows, that’s all we’re still doing. We’re a handful of people who never let a cold case go.” His thumbs moved over my knuckles. “We just have to keep it that way.”

I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for years. I leaned forward and pressed my brow to his, just for a moment, just to borrow his steadiness. “Okay.”

Into the quiet that followed, someone spoke.

“It’s midnight.”

Madden. I pulled back from Jace and looked at her, at my cousin, whose face I had spent the entire night unable to fully read because she held herself the way I held myself, contained and careful, the family resemblance apparently extending well past the eyes.

“It’s a new year, and you’re home. You’re alive. Even if no one else in the world can know it—” Something moved across her composure, just for a second. “I think that’s worth celebrating.”

Willa was already on her feet. “I’ll get the champagne.”

Forty-Three

JACE

I’d been up since before dawn.

I’d slept only two hours, in pieces, surfacing each time to run another scenario and then forcing myself back under because exhaustion made for bad decisions, and I needed to be sharp. Layla had been beside me for some of it, awake when I was awake, neither of us pretending otherwise, both of us staring at the ceiling and working our own versions of the same problem. At some point before the light came up, she’d slipped out of bed, and I’d let her, because I understood the need to move when your mind wouldn’t stop.

Now I stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug of coffee going cold in my hand and watched her work.

She’d taken over the dining room. The table had been pushed against the wall and the chairs stacked on top of it, clearing a space in the center of the floor. She moved through a slow, controlled sequence of forms. The same fluid practice I’d seen her run on the beach, the kind that wasn’t about fighting so much as it was about staying inside her own body. The early light came through the east windows and caught her as she moved. Her hair was loose. Her feet were bare on the hardwood. Koa lay in the corner with his head up, focused on her as always, on duty even at rest.

I knew what I was looking at now in a way I hadn’t before.

I’d admired her competence from the first night on the beach, the way she carried herself, the economy of her movements. She’d put me on my ass back at the gym, and something lit up that had no business lighting up in that moment. But she’d been a stranger then—a woman named Layla Murphy with botanical sleeves and a service dog and a story she wouldn’t tell.

Now I watched her and saw the girl underneath. Willa’s friend. The girl from the photographs, the one whose disappearance had cracked my sister’s life in half. She was in there, in the line of the jaw and the set of the eyes. I could see her now that I knew to look. I could see, too, the exact shape of what had been done to her, because every bit of this discipline and control and lethal precision had been built out of the wreckage of a girl who hadn’t had any of it the night she walked into the woods to meet a boy.

She finished the sequence and crossed to the far end of the room, where I’d set up the target sometime around three in the morning when lying in bed had become intolerable.

There wasn’t much on the island to work with, but the garage had a stack of plywood sheets that got pressed into service every hurricane season for boarding up the windows and doors that didn’t already have custom hurricane panels. I’d hauled several of them in and layered them against the wall, and I’d found a can of spray paint on the workbench and put a rough target on the face of it. Concentric rings. A center mark. It wasn’t pretty. It would do.

She picked up one of her knives from where she’d lined them on the windowsill. Settled her weight. Threw.

The blade hit just left of center and stuck. She retrieved it, walked back, and threw again. Center this time. Again. Again. The rhythm of it was its own kind of meditation: the steady thunk of steel into wood, and I stood in the doorway and watched her do the thing she did to keep herself whole and thought about whether any of it would be enough.

That was the part I couldn’t put down.

She was formidable. She had trained herself into something most people would never want to face. But Halston Ashmore didn’t fight people directly. Men like Halston had other people do that for them, and the operation behind him had been running long enough and quiet enough to make a sloppy police chief disappear with a sniper’s bullet and a man in a medium-security prison die in an altercation nobody would ever question too hard. All her preparation, all her skill, all her hard-won lethality—none of it would mean anything against the right rifle at the right distance.

The burden of that sat on me with a weight I hadn’t felt in years. I’d kept other people alive in dangerous places, and I was good at it. I’d learned to carry the responsibility without letting it crush me. This was different. This had a name now. Hers. And I had no intention of examining too closely the things I was already willing to do to make sure nothing happened to her.

I set the cold coffee on the counter and stepped out onto the deck.

The morning was gray and still, the Atlantic a metallic chop under low clouds. I pulled up the contact and hit call.