Page 95 of Carry on Wayward Son

I threw my head forward to break his face, and the ties caught me short, my whole body straining against them and getting nowhere, my forehead stopping inches from his. The failure lit my panic up again. He didn’t even flinch. He’d known I couldn’t reach him. He’d bound me so I couldn’t reach him.

He laughed and stepped back, delighted all over again.

“Quite the little wildcat now.” He set down his drink and picked something up off the table behind him, and when he turned back the fog was thin enough that I clearly saw my knife in his hand. Everything in me turned still and cold.

He brought the blade to my face. Laid the flat against my cheek, almost tender, then turned it and drew the tip slow along my jaw, down toward my throat, and rested it a hairsbreadth from the pulse, watching my eyes for the fear.

The fog chose that moment to finish lifting.

And what I was left with, finally, fully, in hard, clean focus, was the complete shape of how thoroughly I was screwed.

I was bound to a chair with more ties than I could fight, disarmed, my own knife at my throat in the hand of the man who’d cause me to spend half a lifetime training so that no one would ever put me in a chair like this again. That was the clarity the drug left me as it drained away. Not an opening. Not a wire in the crate. Just the whole truth of it, sharp as the blade against my skin: every hour on the mats, every form, every knife I’d thrown into plywood until my shoulder ached, every mile run, every reflex I’d hammered into my body so deep it lived below thought—all of it, the entire architecture of the woman I’d built out of the girl he’d broken—and here I was. Back in a room with him. Bound. Helpless. Exactly where I’d started, like none of it had happened at all.

I had done everything right. I had spent my whole adult life becoming someone who could not be taken, and I’d been taken anyway, off a dark road, by people patient enough to wait for the one mistake I swore I’d never make. And I’d made it. For Jace. I’d made it for Jace, and it had brought me here, and now my own blade rested against my throat and there was nothing—nothing—I could do about it.

I let him see none of the turmoil. That much I still had. The fog was gone, and the panic was crouched and contained, and my face gave him a flat, steady nothing. I watched the small flicker of his disappointment that the terror he’d dreamed of wasn’t there.

“You really want to know what you are to me?” he said softly. “I think you’ll find it illuminating.”

He pulled the chair close and sat, the knife loose in his hand, and he settled in.

“I saw you before any of it started. Did you know that? Of course you didn’t.” He smiled. “A summer party, out here on this miserable little island. You were fifteen, in a yellow dress, and you laughed at something across the lawn, and I decided right then. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers softly. “I wanted you. And I’m not a man who’s told he can’t have a thing he wants.”

I held his eyes and said nothing. The fog was gone now, and I wished, almost, that it wasn’t.

“The trouble was you weren’t for sale. A local girl, a family, people who’d notice.” He tilted his head. “So I made you available. That took some doing. That took a great deal of doing, actually, and I want you to appreciate it, because you’re the only person alive who can.”

A sick sort of certainty set up in my gut. “The marina.” My voice came steadier than it had any right to.

“The marina.” He looked pleased that I’d kept up. “You think your brother was pressured to launder money and refused, and you were taken to punish him. That’s the story, isn’t it? That’s what you all decided.”

I didn’t answer. He saw on my face that he’d guessed right, and it delighted him.

“We built the whole thing for him to refuse.” He leaned in. “A clean-cut boy, a family business, just enough decency to say no. We counted on the no, Gwen. The no was the entire point. Because a refusal gave us cause. It gave us a reason to make an example of the Busbys, and the example—” the knife tipped toward me, “—was always going to be you. The money was never about the money. The threats, the videos, the marina, all of it scaffolding. Theater. An expensive, patient piece of theater built around getting one girl off this island in a way that looked like something else entirely.”

I made myself keep breathing. Miles. Miles in a cell, dead for a refusal that had been written for him before he ever opened his mouth.

“My father thought it was leverage.” Contempt sharpened his voice, a son’s contempt. “To him, the whole Busby affair was business—establishing a node, a useful island, money to be washed. He never knew the business was a cover and the girl was the point. I moved my father’s entire apparatus to fetch myself a present, and the old man never had the faintest idea.” The smile widened. “I’ve always been rather proud of that.”

“Willa,” I said before I managed to stop myself. “She nearly died. In the water.”

“Was that her name? The friend.” He waved the knife, dismissive, and a cold spike of hatred shot through me, so pure it cut through everything. “Collateral. She walked into the woods with you, that’s all. The note, the secret admirer—that was for you. She simply had the poor judgment to come along.”

So there it was. All of it, in his own voice, savored and unhurried. Willa’s years inside a broken mind, Miles’s death, the whole rippling ruin across every life I loved, and he laid it out like a man describing a clever thing he’d done at work, because to him that was exactly what it was.

“You were never collateral,” he said, bringing it back to me, gentle now, almost tender. “You were never leverage. You were the entire point, Gwen. Everything that happened was because I saw a girl in a yellow dress and decided to keep her. I built all of this to have you.”

He watched for it to break me. All this time, he’d waited to watch this exact knowledge land and break me.

It didn’t break me. It landed like the end of the world, but it didn’t break me. I held his eyes through that ending and gave him nothing, because the girl he’d wanted—the fifteen-year-old he’d built this monument of ruin to possess—was gone. He’d killed her himself, in that crate, and he had no idea that the woman in front of him was someone else entirely, someone made in the wreckage he’d caused, someone he had never met and would never understand and did not own. Would not own. No matter what he did with my blade against my throat in his beautiful, cold room.

I gave him a still face and steady eyes and let him keep waiting.

And the waiting got to him. I saw his jaw tighten, the delight curdling at the edges when the reaction he’d dreamed of simply didn’t come. A man like Halston, denied the thing he wanted, reached for another way to feel large.

“You should understand what you started,” he said. The intimacy left his voice and something prouder came in, the tone of a man talking about his work. “My father built all this. The island, the routes, the whole apparatus. Drugs, mostly, for years. He found this place and saw what it was good for. A quiet through port nobody watches. Product moving up and down the coast and nothing ever touching us.” He turned the knife idly in his hand. “Careful man, my father. Disciplined. But getting old. Cautious in the way old men get cautious. Unwilling to expand, unwilling to see what was sitting right in front of him.”

Halston leaned forward.