Page 84 of Carry on Wayward Son

Two rings.

“Bit early, even for you,” Dax said.

“I need to redirect the ask.”

Something in my tone must have carried, because the easy edge left his voice. “Go.”

“Forget the broad family architecture for now. I still want it eventually, but the priority’s changed. I need everything you can find on the son. Halston Ashmore specifically. Travel records, financials, property, known associates. Anything operational.” The gray water moved with the rhythmic pulse of the tide. “If he’s been somewhere, I want to know. If he’s connected to someone, I want the name. Whatever you can pull.”

Dax went quiet.

Not the quiet of a man waiting for me to continue. The other quiet—the one that meant he’d already started pulling threads, that somewhere on the other end of the line he was looking at a screen, and his attention had narrowed to a point. I’d heard that quiet a hundred times over the years and it never meant nothing.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked finally.

“A lot. None of it’s relevant to what you need to do.”

“Mm.” A pause. “This the same investigation as before?”

“Same investigation. Sharper focus.”

“And the urgency?”

“As real as it gets.”

The keys started moving on his end, that rapid, familiar clacking. “I’ve already got some of his architecture from the family pull I was doing. Give me a day to run him specifically. Maybe two.” He paused, and the keys stopped. “Hollingsworth. The kind of thing you’re describing—if I find what it sounds like you think I’m going to find, you understand that’s not a thing you walk back. Once you know, you know. And then you’re responsible for knowing.”

I thought about the conversation I’d be having eventually with people above me. The op I’d come here to run to identify the bigger fish I was supposed to be after, and the institutional machinery that had its own ideas about what mattered and what was acceptable to spend along the way. There was a version of all of that conversation that would end with Halston Ashmore left alive and in place because of what he could lead to, what he could be turned into, and what bigger names sat above him in the structure. Assuming he was part of the machinery and not simply a client.

I didn’t let the thought finish forming. The conversation hadn’t been had, and I hadn’t yet pinned Halston down.

“I understand,” I said.

“All right.” The keys started again. “I’ll call you.”

He was gone before I could answer.

I stood on the deck a moment longer, looking at the water, and then I went back inside.

Layla was still at it, the steady rhythm of the knives unbroken, each one finding its mark with a precision that had my blood heating. I ignored it. Now wasn’t the time.

I’d just picked my coffee back up, intending to dump the cold remnants and start over, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. The slow, unhurried shuffle of someone who wasn’t fully awake yet and wasn’t trying to be.

Willa came down in her robe, the flannel one she’d had since college that she refused to throw away, her caramel hair an absolute disaster and her hazel eyes still carrying most of the night in them. She stopped beside me in the kitchen doorway and took in the scene with the unhurried patience of someone who had already accepted that her life was strange—the dining room cleared of everything that could be damaged, the plywood target propped against the far wall, the woman methodically burying knives in its center with mechanical calm while Koa sat a few feet back and supervised with the gravity of a dog who took his responsibilities seriously.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“So,” Willa said finally, her voice still rough with sleep. “You’re sleeping with one of my best friends.”

I gave her the side-eye.

She grinned—the first real grin I’d seen from her since before the party, broad and unguarded, the morning light coming through the kitchen window catching it in a way that made her look about sixteen. “You officially can no longer give me any grief about Sawyer.”

I reached over and tugged a piece of her disaster hair, gently enough that she didn’t swat me. “Understood.”

She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, and I let mine settle against the other side, and we stood there together as Layla threw. The knives hit home one after another, that clean, solid sound repeating itself in the quiet of the morning, and for one suspended moment, the enormity of everything—the threat still sitting out there with Halston Ashmore’s name on it, the call I was waiting on, the weight of what Dax was going to find—pulled back just far enough to let something else through. The possibility of an after. A version of all of this where the woman in the dining room got to put the knives down someday, where the thing she’d been running from for years finally stopped having teeth, where she got to stay. Got to be part of the life we were all still figuring out how to build on this island, in whatever shape that eventually took.

I hadn’t let myself consider that possibility before. It had felt like the kind of thing you didn’t examine too closely while it was still fragile. But I let myself look at it now, just for a second, while my sister stood warm and half-asleep beside me and the morning came in through the windows and the knives hit home.