Page 76 of Carry on Wayward Son

I turned slightly toward Jace and kept my voice under the noise of the room. “Steady there, Golden Boy.”

He exhaled once. Controlled. Deliberate. Some of the iron went out of him, and he glanced at me sideways with a mix of gratitude and the awareness of being seen and the slight irritation of a man who would rather not have needed either, all of it in a single glance lasting about a second before he put it away too.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“Later,” I said. “We’ll debrief later.”

He nodded, picked up a champagne glass from a passing tray, and turned back to the room. I turned with him and let my attention go where it was trained to go. Methodical, unhurried, the slow sweep of a space I catalogued for purposes I didn’t yet fully understand.

The party had reached its full rhythm. The crowd had thickened since we arrived. The noise level had risen with it, the clusters of conversation shifting and reforming as people worked the room. The pianist transitioned into something with more movement. Bar service moved in smooth arcs through the crowd. The whole thing had the expensive, frictionless quality of an event where every variable had been controlled in advance.

I was tracking the body language of a conversation across the room when a laugh distracted me. Full-throated and assured, it was the laugh of a man who understood that laughter was a form of currency in rooms like this and spent it freely because he had an inexhaustible supply. Every room he’d ever been in had laughed when he laughed. Every room had arranged itself around him.

Something in my hindbrain registered the sound before my conscious mind caught up. Some long dormant animal layer that I’d spent years working to quiet, came suddenly and completely awake.

He stood perhaps forty feet away, working a cluster of guests with the practiced ease of a host who understood that the real work of a party was the circulation. Impeccably dressed, champagne held loosely at his side, laughing at something a man beside him said and touching his shoulder as he laughed, the easy physicality of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin and in every room he’d ever occupied. Somewhere in his late thirties. Well-maintained in the way serious money maintained people. Well-rested. The kind of man who’d never once gone to sleep worrying about what the next day would cost him.

My gaze moved to his face and catalogued what it found.

The small pucker of scar tissue beside his right eye, pale and old, worked into the landscape of his skin so carefully that you’d have to know to look for it. The hairline scar along his jaw, barely visible under foundation that had been applied by someone who knew what they were doing, the seam of it almost lost in the natural shadow of the bone. The way the skin near his left temple sat fractionally differently from the skin around it, the signature of reconstruction, the ghost of a graft that the best surgeons in the world had worked to make invisible and had nearly succeeded.

He was laughing. His hands were moving. Someone said something that made the cluster around him lean in.

The party continued. The pianist played. Jace said something at my shoulder that I registered as sound without processing as words.

The glass in my hand was cold. I was aware of Koa not being here, of the knives strapped to my thighs under the dress, of every exit I’d clocked when we came in and the distance to each of them.

I knew this face.

Not this face. This face had been rebuilt with extraordinary skill and considerable expense, motivated by something I now understood with a completeness that felt like the floor dropping away. But underneath the reconstruction, in the architecture of bone and proportion that no surgeon could entirely remake, I knew it. I’d been close enough to it in the dark of a night to have pressed a knife against that jaw and used it, and I had believed every day since that the work I’d done had been permanent.

He was supposed to be dead.

I had built Layla Murphy on that reality. Every choice, every risk, every carefully layered year of a life constructed from the ground up had been built on the single certain foundation that he was dead, and I had made him so. I’d stopped looking over my shoulder because of it. I’d come back to this island because of it, believing the danger was elsewhere, that whoever was at the top of this had a face I didn’t know yet.

I knew his face.

He was alive and standing twenty feet away and laughing and the room was full of people who had no idea what he was. And I was standing perfectly still with my water glass and my upswept hair and nothing showing on my face because there was nothing else available to me right now.

He turned from the cluster he’d been working.

His eyes moved through the room with the slow, proprietary ease of a man surveying what was his, touching each corner with the satisfaction of ownership.

They reached me.

And stopped.

Thirty-Nine

JACE

I had to work not to grind my teeth. I’d had to work harder the entire time we’d stood with my father as he assessed Layla for her potential. Because women weren’t people to him. They were assets to be used. It was how he’d treated my mother for more than thirty years. How he’d treated Willa until she’d taken herself far enough away that they couldn’t touch her anymore. And looking at him now, I saw what I hadn’t let myself see in considering his potential involvement in all of this.

A man who believed women were less. More, a man who believed they were something to be owned.

I couldn’t understand that kind of entitlement. An entitlement that could well lead to someone making investments in profitable ventures targeting other equally entitled asswipes.

He was a legitimately horrible person. But did that make him a part of this? I was still sifting through the possibilities when something changed in the woman beside me.