Page 91 of Carry on Wayward Son

Madden glanced up. “It’s dark. Take⁠—”

“Just to the yard.” I was already moving, Koa rising from his spot by the table and falling in at my knee, reading the shift in me the way he read everything, alert now, ears working. “Two minutes.”

I didn’t go to the yard.

The Bronco was parked at the side of the house where Sawyer had left it after retrieving it from the cottage along with the rest of my things. Koa jumped into the back without being told twice, and I got behind the wheel with the knives at my thighs and my heart going hard and steady. I told myself the whole time that I was overreacting. That I’d get to town and find Jace pushing back from a half-eaten dinner, and I’d feel like a fool, and we’d laugh about it later. After Jace finished reaming me out for being an idiot. That this was the anxiety talking, the fear of finally having something to lose.

I cranked the engine and pulled out of the drive.

I was on the coast road, the village lights still a few minutes ahead, when my phone started ringing in the cup holder. Madden’s name, then a second call stacking behind it, and I understood they’d realized I was gone. I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t turn into them trying to stop me, and I was already committed, already past the point where stopping made sense.

The road up here was dark and empty, maritime forest crowding the shoulder to one side, the marsh giving way to the beach on the other, no streetlights this far from the village. My headlights cut a narrow channel through it. Koa shifted in the back, restless, picking up on my rising tension.

I almost didn’t see it.

Something across the road, low and dark against the asphalt, and my brain registered it a half second too late—a line, a glint, a thing that didn’t belong on the road surface—and then both front tires let go at once with a sound like a shotgun, and the wheel wrenched in my hands.

Training took over. I didn’t brake hard. Braking hard was how you rolled. I came off the gas and fought the wheel and tried to ride it down, but I was going too fast and the shoulder came up too quick. The Bronco’s front end caught the soft sand at the edge, dug in, and the world turned sideways.

The impact came from everywhere. The seatbelt cut across my chest. Glass. The crunch and shriek of metal finding something it couldn’t move through. Koa was thrown against the back of my seat with a heavy sound that I felt more than heard, and then the Bronco rocked hard and slammed to a stop at an angle, nose-down in the marsh, the engine ticking, one headlight still burning.

I was reeling. Couldn’t get a full breath. Something hot ran down the side of my face.

Koa.

He was moving in the back, scrambling, and then he was up and snarling—a sound I’d rarely heard from him, the full-throated rage of a hundred pounds of malamute who understood his person was in danger—barking, throwing himself toward the broken-out window. I reached for him, calling his name and trying to get my hand on the seatbelt buckle all at once.

A shape moved in the dark beyond the glass.

Koa’s snarl climbed and then broke into a high, sharp yelp, and his body dropped, and I screamed something—his name or a command or merely rage—my hand already going to the knife at my thigh because they’d hurt my dog and the cold thing in me that had kept me alive at fifteen came roaring up out of the dark where I kept it.

The door wrenched open. Metal screaming against metal.

A hand closed on my arm and pulled.

I didn’t fight the momentum, instead using the pull and driving the knife up and out toward the shape that was hauling me into the night. The blade landed. Bit into something that gave. A man’s voice ripped out a curse in the dark, and the grip on me faltered.

I didn’t stop. I couldn’t see, my head was wrong, the ground wasn’t where it should be, but I struck again, kept the knife moving, hit whatever I could reach because stopping meant the cage, and I would die before I went back to the cage.

The prick of the needle came at the side of my neck.

Small. Almost nothing. A bee sting in the dark.

I kept fighting. I told my hand to hold the knife, and my hand stopped listening. I told my legs to drive, and my legs softened like noodles. The knife slipped out of fingers that had stopped being mine. It hit the road with a metallic clang, and the dark that had been all around me started coming from the inside too, rising up to meet the night.

Koa, I thought. I have to get to Koa.

Jace.

And then I didn’t think anything at all.

Forty-Seven

JACE

After an hour and a half of my father rambling at length and with his usual charm, circling his subjects without ever quite landing on them, I had nothing. I’d fished the whole meal, working the angles under the cover of a son finally showing interest, and what I’d pulled up was exactly the picture Dax had sketched and nothing more. John knew Edmund Ashmore. John had funded ventures connected to Edmund Ashmore. John was certainly acquainted with Marcus Teller, had put money into Teller’s projects, and considered him a sound investment. And when I’d steered close to the questions that mattered—where does the money come from, what’s underneath it—my father had given me the truest thing he’d said all night, with no idea he was giving me anything at all.

“I don’t ask.” He said it easily, a man explaining something self-evident to a slow student. “That’s not my job. My job is to recognize a good return when I see one. A man comes to me with capital that wants to grow, I help it grow. Where he got it, what he does otherwise, is his business. I’ve found that the people who insist on knowing everything tend not to last long in this line of work.” He’d smiled, pleased with his own wisdom. “Discretion is the whole game, Jace. Knowing what not to look at.”