Page 96 of Carry on Wayward Son

“You were what was sitting in front of him. You showed me a whole other line of business he was too timid to touch.” He said it the way another man might describe spotting a gap in the market. “The business existed before, of course. It’s an old one. But less organized in the hands of others. Taking you taught me how it worked. What it cost, what it returned, who paid and how much. You were…call it a proof of concept. The one that showed me it could be done, and done cleanly, and everything I’ve built on that side since—everything I expanded my father’s business to take over—I built because you worked.” A small, satisfied breath. “He’s stepping back now. It’s mine, all of it. The part he built and the part I added. And the part I added started with a girl at a shrimp boil I decided I couldn’t live without.”

I took in every word, and a new sickness moved through me, underneath the rest.

I hadn’t been unique. Not even to the machine. He’d wanted me the way a man wants a possession, but he’d also used me—my abduction, the engineered ruin of my family—as a market test. A trial run. He’d taken me and watched how it worked and decided the numbers were good, and the girls who came after me came because I had been profitable. Because I’d worked. There were others, an unknown number of them, stretching out across the years on the far side of me, and they existed because acquiring me had penciled out.

It was almost too large to hold. I held it anyway. Because the part of me that never stopped working, even drugged, even bound, even with my own knife at my throat, understood something the rest of me couldn’t comprehend yet.

He was confessing.

He was standing in his beautiful, cold room, telling me that he and his father had built and run and expanded a criminal enterprise across more than a decade. That Edmund had founded it on the drug routes, and Halston had grown it into something worse. He was telling me the names, and the structure, and the whole shape of it, because he was certain I would never leave this room to repeat a word.

He was wrong about that. He’d been wrong about a great many things tonight, starting with who I was.

So I gave him my still face and my steady eyes, and I let him talk. And I filed every word the way I’d filed things my whole career—the testimony of a man who believed himself untouchable, banking itself in the mind of the one person who was going to walk out of here and use it.

And underneath it, I did the only thing left to me. I looked. I made my clearing mind work the room. The windows, the dark beyond them, the stairs, the table, the distance from this chair to anything at all. I tested each tie with the smallest flex, learning the exact measure of how little they gave. I tracked the knife and his weight, and the discarded drink. I hunted for the wire. The crack. The overlooked thing.

There wasn’t one. He’d learned. He’d learned from me, of all people, and there was no opening, and I was not getting out of this chair on my own.

But he didn’t know what I knew.

He thought this was the last chapter. Just the two of us in a room, the way he’d dreamed it. He didn’t understand that he’d taken something that belonged to people now. That somewhere out in the dark a man was standing over my wrecked Bronco and my bloody knife, putting it together with a mind built for exactly this, and that man was not coming alone, and was not coming to talk.

So I sat in the chair with the knife at my throat, and let Halston Ashmore have his moment, and I kept looking for the opening I hadn’t found.

And I waited for them.

They would come.

I knew it the way I knew my own name. Both of them.

Forty-Nine

JACE

We went in light because light was what we had.

Kevlar vests, sidearms, tactical knives. It wasn’t much. But it was the four of us, and the four of us had never needed much.

The island was as locked down as we could manage. Sawyer had killed the ferry inside ten minutes of my call, the marina was holding private craft, and Daniel had the Coast Guard watching the water. Rios had put a BOLO on Halston Ashmore with instructions to detain on sight. None of that was going to find him, and I knew it, because I knew exactly where he was. He was here, in his glass house on the south end, because a man that arrogant didn’t run. He’d waited years for her. He wasn’t going anywhere until he was finished.

We came up on Ashmore’s monument of glass and pale stone through the dark from the dune side, no lights, no sound. From the party, I knew the layout of the grounds, the rooms now lit low and warm or dark. I’d walked through here with a champagne glass in my hand and Layla on my arm, and that knowledge of the place was the one advantage we had. Now I was using it to get her back out.

We’d clocked two men on the approach. One on the ground floor moving through the lit rooms, one posted near the side entrance. Hired muscle, not soldiers. Comfortable. They weren’t expecting anyone, because the whole point of a spike strip on a dark road was that the people who’d notice she was gone wouldn’t know where to look.

They were wrong about that.

We took the posted man first. Ford and I came up on him from his blind side, and it was over before he understood he wasn’t alone. Ford’s arm across his throat, my hand controlling the weapon hand, the two of us taking him down to the ground and holding him there until he stopped moving, then zip-cuffing him and leaving him secured and silent against the wall. Clean. Fast. The kind of thing the four of us could do without a word passing between us, because we’d been reading each other our whole lives.

The second man was inside. We found him in a side hallway, and this one I recognized the instant the light caught the field dressing wrapped tight around his forearm, blood already soaking through it, the white of it stark against the dark fabric of his sleeve.

The man Layla had cut.

Something cold and satisfied moved through me at the sight of it. She’d gotten a piece of him. Of course she had. Bound and outnumbered and dragged out of a wreck, and she’d still opened this man up to the bone before they put her under. Whatever they’d done to take her, she’d made them bleed for it.

He reached for his weapon when he saw us. He was a half second slow, the wounded arm not cooperating, and Rios closed the distance and put him on the floor with brutal efficiency. Sawyer was there to help hold him, and then he was cuffed and down and out of it with tape over his mouth, and we hadn’t fired a shot or made a sound that would carry.

I oriented off my memory of the party. The main rooms ran along the ocean side, all that glass, the spaces meant to be seen and to show off the view. But Halston wouldn’t keep her there, behind windows where anyone might see. He’d want somewhere interior. Contained. I ran the layout in my head—the great room, the kitchen, the gallery hall—and landed on the one space I remembered with only a narrow slot of a window, an interior room toward the back, the kind of room a man chose when he didn’t want what was happening inside it to be visible from the dark.