Page 85 of Carry on Wayward Son

Then Layla turned, the last knife still quivering in the center of the target, and caught us both watching her. She didn’t say anything. The corner of her mouth kicked up in that small, private way it had, like she was keeping something back, and something in my chest pulled taut and then eased.

I held onto that feeling a moment longer before I let it go.

Forty-Four

LAYLA

I was steadier now. The knives always did that for me: the rhythm of them, the way they demanded just enough of my attention to crowd out everything else. Bless Jace for thinking of it. For knowing, somehow, that it would help when I’d lain next to him in the dark and worked the problem from every angle until the angle started repeating.

I wished I could go for a run. Eight miles up the beach in the gray morning, the kind of distance that emptied me out and let me start over. But I understood why a run wasn’t sensible right now. A predictable route, an open beach, a woman alone—I’d taught classes on exactly why that was a bad idea. So I stayed inside, and I drank my coffee, and I watched the horses.

A handful of them milled down on the beach below the dune line, clustered in the loose way they did when the morning was calm and there was nothing to spook them. I’d missed them on Orcas. In all the years away, in all the careful construction of a new life in a place I’d genuinely come to love, the wild horses had been one of the pieces of home that never stopped tugging at me. Something about the sight of them had always made my heart skip. They belonged to no one. They answered to no one. They ran the north end of this island because it was theirs and always had been.

I envied them that. The freedom of it.

It was a freedom Willa was protecting. She was turning the whole north end of the island into a wildlife sanctuary, writing the grants and fighting the fights to make it real, so the horses would have this stretch of sand and grass for as long as the island stood. And if that wasn’t the most Willa thing I’d ever heard, I didn’t know what was. The girl who’d been caged by her own family had grown into a woman who spent her life making sure other living things stayed free.

I wondered if I’d ever be able to think of this place as a sanctuary again. If we’d actually get to the bottom of all of it. If we’d find the chink in the armor, the thread to pull, the thing that would finally bring down Halston Ashmore and whatever sat above him.

It was a strange thing to picture him alive. Somewhere on this island, probably in the glass monstrosity on the south end, drinking his coffee the way I was drinking mine. For fourteen years I’d carried the weight of his death. I’d never regretted it. There’d never been a question in my mind that it was kill or be killed, that the girl in the cage had done the only thing she could do to survive. But I’d carried the knowledge that I’d ended a life to save my own all the same.

The police had never confirmed it. After my escape, I’d staggered through the unfamiliar city, trying to get as far from that cage as possible. Eventually, I’d passed out. A good samaritan had found me and gotten me to the hospital. But I’d been so traumatized, I’d never been able to give police a clear description of where I’d been held.

Honestly, the idea that he’d died in that nightmare basement and never been found had been a comfort to me. As if I’d managed to close a door on that part of my life.

And now it turned out I hadn’t killed him after all. There was a strange, cold relief in that. I didn’t actually wear the stain I’d thought I wore.

Not that it changed what I’d do. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I’d make sure it took this time, if that was what it came to. If it would keep me and others like me safe.

Had there been others since me? Was Halston a regular customer of whoever ran all this, working his way through girls the way he worked a room at a party? Or had I been special somehow, the way Jace kept circling back to?

I couldn’t fathom why I would have been. I’d been fifteen. A child. My curves back then had leaned more toward baby fat than anything a man would call a figure. I’d been average in nearly every measurable way—average looks, average height, better-than-average grades but nothing like my cousin’s academic accolades.

But Halston had never looked at me like I was average.

He’d looked at me with avarice. With ownership. He’d gotten off on it. Not on me, not really, but on the fact of his control, the totality of it, the knowledge that he held every single thing about my world in his hands and could do whatever he wanted with it. So maybe it had never been about what I looked like at all. Maybe it had only ever been about what he could do, and to whom, and the fact that no one would stop him.

He wouldn’t get the chance to do it again. Not to me. I’d trained too long and too hard to ever be taken unaware the way that girl had been. And Jace⁠—

Jace would rain down hell itself on anyone who tried.

I loved him for that. I let myself acknowledge it, standing at the window with the horses below me. I loved him for the way he’d looked at me last night when the truth came out. No rejection in it, no judgment, not a flicker of him deciding I was broken or ruined or lessened by what I’d been forced to do to survive. He’d looked at me and seen strength. He admired it. He’d built a target out of plywood in the middle of the night so I’d have somewhere to put the fear.

As if summoned by the thought, he came up behind me. I felt him before I heard him, my body reacting to his warmth because I seemed to have a sixth sense for where he was in a room. His arms slid around my waist, and he settled his chin near my shoulder and looked out the window with me.

I relaxed back into him.

That part still amazed me. That my body, which had spent years treating every point of contact as a threat to be assessed, simply softened into his without consulting me first. I’d spent so long being careful. And here I was, leaning back against a man and watching wild horses and letting myself be held.

If someone had come back from the future to tell fifteen-year-old Gwen Busby that one day Golden Boy Jace Hollingsworth would be her lover—that he’d hold her in a kitchen at dawn and look at her like she hung the stars—she’d have laughed them straight out the door. Jace Hollingsworth had been Willa’s untouchable older brother, entirely out of reach, the subject of exactly the kind of hopeless teenage daydream that had no business surviving everything that came after.

But here we were.

I didn’t know where we were going. I didn’t know what the future held, for him or for me, or for whatever this was between us. But I knew I hoped he was in it. That was as far as I’d let myself dream, and even that felt like more than I had any right to.

He pressed a kiss to my temple and didn’t say anything as we stood there together until the moment finished on its own.

Gabi arrived first.