Page 97 of Carry on Wayward Son

I signaled. Sawyer and Ford peeled off to cover the exits, the front and the side, so that whatever happened, no one left this house. Rios and I circled toward the back.

The door was ajar. Light spilling out of it, warm and low.

And through the gap I saw Layla bound to a chair by a fuckton of ties placed by someone who’d thought hard about not giving her room. Blood streaked down from her temple, dried dark, and bruising already mottled one cheekbone. Her head was up. Her eyes were open. She was conscious, and she was alive, and the single largest thing I’d been carrying since I found her Bronco in the dunes released its grip on my chest all at once, so completely that for a half second I had to lock my knees against it.

Alive. She was alive.

I put the relief away the same way I’d locked up the panic on the dark road, in the box where it belonged, because relief got her killed just as dead as panic if I let it slow me down. She was alive and still in that chair, and Halston Ashmore was standing over her with a knife. The job wasn’t done.

Rios read my signal and nodded. We had no clean shot. Halston stood too close to her, the angle wrong. A round that missed by an inch would kill her instead. So we played it the only way it could be played. Rios entered first, sidearm up and trained center mass, and I held back of the doorway, out of the sightline, waiting for my opening.

Layla saw Rios the instant he cleared the threshold. She couldn’t lock down the flicker of recognition that crossed her face, and Halston caught it.

He moved fast. The knife came off the table and around to her throat, edge against her skin, and he hauled in tight behind the chair, putting her body between himself and the door before Rios had said a word. The whole thing took less than a second. A man who’d been waiting for someone to come and had already decided what he’d do when they did.

“That’s far enough.” His rebuilt face had gone ugly. “Weapon down, Chief, or I open her up right here.”

Rios didn’t lower the gun. He kept it level and kept his voice easy, the low, calm register he used to talk men off ledges. “Halston Ashmore. It’s over. The island’s locked down. Your men are in custody. There’s nowhere left for you to go, so let’s everybody slow down and think about this.”

“Slow down.” Halston laughed, high and wrong. “You have no idea what you’ve walked into. Do you know who my father is? Do you have the first idea what protects this? You touch me and it comes down on all of you, everyone you love⁠—”

I was already moving.

I wasn’t listening to the words. I was watching the knife, and the angle, and the way he held her, and I was doing the cold, clear math that I’d been trained to do.

There was no version of this where Halston Ashmore let her live. I knew it the way I knew the layout of the house. A man like this didn’t get a thing he’d wanted this long and let it walk away. If he couldn’t keep her, no one would have her. The knife at her throat wasn’t leverage. It was intent, looking for the moment to become action. The second he understood there was no deal to be made, no way out that ended with him keeping her, he was going to open her throat out of pure spite, and there was no negotiation Rios could run fast enough to stop it.

And even if by some miracle he surrendered—even if he set the knife down and let himself be taken—he was Edmund Ashmore’s son, with the resources of that empire behind him and a head full of everything about his father’s dealings and his own. He’d lawyer up. He’d deal. He’d trade his knowledge of the operation up the chain to people who’d want exactly that, and he’d walk, or he’d serve a fraction of a sentence somewhere comfortable, and he’d never stop being a thing that existed in the world, somewhere, that could come for her again.

I’d already accepted what that meant. Somewhere on the drive south I’d accepted it without ever saying it to myself. There would be consequences. I’d face them. They were worth it.

While he was still talking, still spitting his father’s name like a shield, I moved.

He’d put all his attention on Rios, the visible threat, the man with the badge in front of him. He’d forgotten to keep track of me, because in his version of the world he was always the most dangerous man in the room, and that arrogance was the wire in the crate. I came around the side, fast and silent, inside his guard before the words had finished leaving his mouth, and I got my hands where they needed to be—one at the back of his skull, one along the jaw—and I broke his neck the way I’d been trained to break it, one sharp decisive movement.

He dropped. The knife fell away from her throat as he crumpled, and he was dead before he hit the floor, and the room was suddenly, enormously quiet.

I stepped over his body without looking and crouched in front of her.

“I’ve got you.” I had my own knife out, working the zip ties, wrist and forearm and ankle, fast and careful, my hands steadier than they had any right to be. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. It’s done.”

The ties came away, and she came up out of the chair and into me, and I caught her. She shook and babbled, the words tumbling out half-formed.

“I’m sorry. Jace, I’m sorry, I left, I shouldn’t have left, I thought you were—I found the thing about your father, and I thought you were in danger, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t sit there, I had to⁠—”

“Hey. Hey.” I had one hand at the back of her head, holding her against me, the other arm wrapped around her, and I felt how hard she shook now that it was over, the adrenaline and the drug and half a lifetime of nightmare all coming apart at once. “Stop. You don’t have to. None of that matters.”

“It does, I put you in⁠—”

“You’re safe.” I pressed it into her hair. “That’s the only thing. You’re safe, I’m here, he’s gone. He’s gone, Layla. He’s never touching you again.”

She stopped trying to explain. She just held on, her face against my chest, and I held her, and for a moment the room and the body on the floor and everything still ahead of us fell away, and there was only the fact of her, alive, breathing, in my arms.

Over her head, I looked at Rios.

He was holstering his weapon, his eyes moving from Halston’s body to me and back, and I watched him make the decision, watched the chief of police and the brother arrive at the same place.

“Her life was imperiled,” Rios said. His voice was even and clear, the voice of a man stating a fact for the record. “He had a knife to her throat, and he was going to use it. None of us had a clean shot.” A beat. “You did what needed doing.”