Page 94 of Carry on Wayward Son

Surfacing took a long time.

I came up through layers of darkness, thick and slow, the way you wake from anesthesia and not from sleep. For a long stretch, I knew I was conscious before I could do anything about it. Each thought was like pushing through mud, slow and shapeless, breaking apart before fully forming. I held onto one thing at a time because one thing at a time was all I could hold. Breathing. The fact of breathing. The taste of copper somewhere. The dull, deep ache behind my left eye.

Stay down. The instruction surfaced from somewhere underneath the fog, old training, bone-deep. Stay down, eyes closed, let them think you’re still under. Take stock before you move.

I tried to take stock. The fog kept eating it.

Wrists. My wrists were… bound. Both of them, separately, something biting into the skin. The thought arrived, then slid away, and I had to reach for it again. Bound. My arms too, flat against something, and my ankles. I couldn’t move, and the not-moving woke the thing that always woke when I couldn’t move.

The panic came up fast, and I didn’t have what I needed to contain it.

That was the worst part in those first muddy minutes. The panic rose, and I reached for the steady, deliberate breathing, the this-is-now-not-then, struggling to push the wild whip of it back down. But I couldn’t maintain my hold. It kept slipping from my hands, and the panic kept climbing, and for a long bad moment, I genuinely couldn’t find the thing in myself that managed this. The terror of being blunted, of having my own mind taken away from me right when I needed it, was worse than the binding itself.

Breathe. Just breathe. Don’t think about the rest. Breathe.

It worked eventually. Slower than it should have, clumsier, but it worked, and the panic backed off the ledge. I managed a few clean breaths and held them, and let the fog do what it was going to do.

I opened my eyes a slit.

The room swam and then steadied, more or less. Big. The scale of the room came through even half-drugged. A great pale open space, glass somewhere, light low and warm, the ceiling too far up. My head wouldn’t hold the details. They came in pieces and slid apart. Windows, dark with night. Stone. A staircase, maybe. The pieces wouldn’t assemble into a whole the way they were supposed to, the way my mind always assembled rooms, automatically, exits and angles and distances, and the failure of that automatic thing left me feeling skinned.

Zip ties. That much I confirmed by feel now. Wrists, forearms, ankles, each cinched separately and tightly. A lot of them. Placed by someone who’d thought everything through.

Halston had thought about it.

The understanding arrived before the fog cleared enough to support it, and my stomach turned over.

“There she is.”

His voice. I knew it before I found him in the swimming room, before my eyes pulled him out of the blur and held him. A shape resolving into a man, a man resolving into a face, the face resolving into the one I’d carried in the worst part of me since I was fifteen years old.

Halston Ashmore. Drink in his hand. Watching me come up out of the dark with an expression of pure pleasure.

I tried to assess him and couldn’t, not the way I needed to. My mind reached for him and slid off. I got impressions—the drink, the easy stance, the rebuilt face—and couldn’t make them into anything useable. There was nothing tactical here. Only fear and the waning mental fog.

“Quite a place.” He gestured with the glass, the room turning with the motion and making my stomach lurch. He was talking. Something about the house, the scale of it, about something that had been here before. A storm. A cottage, he said with contempt. I lost pieces of his monologue. The words came and went. I caught his tone more than his meaning. The pride, the appetite, a man in love with the size of what he’d built.

I held onto one thing through the wash of it: he was talking, and talking bought time, and time was the only currency I had.

“What do you want from me?” My voice came out slurred at the edges. I hated that. That slur meant weakness. Meant incapacitation.

He smiled, and the smile cut through the fog cleaner than anything yet, because it held only delight, and delight on that face was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Gwen.”

The name landed. Even underwater, the name landed, and something in me flinched at it.

He kept talking. I caught it in fragments through the thinning haze. “—been waiting for years, since you tore into my face—” “I imagined this moment—” And then something that snagged and held, even half-drugged. “I never imagined you’d walk into my party. On the arm of Jace Hollingsworth, of all people. Then again, he always did seem to have some kind of a thing for you.”

He’d known.

The fog was thinning now. It pulled back, slowly, like a tide of molasses going out, and leaving clarity behind. The clarity was not a gift. The first clear thing it brought me was that he’d known at the party. That long look across the room. He’d known, and I’d spent the days since believing I’d gotten away clean. But I hadn’t. I’d never been clean; he’d seen me the moment I walked in.

It didn’t matter now. I was tied to a chair. Whether he’d known at the party or figured it out after changed nothing about the chair.

My friends knew I was gone. The thought swam up, and I clung to it like a life raft. They’d have found the Bronco by now. Koa—please let Koa be alive, please let them have only put him down with the dart, please let him be lying in the sand, confused and breathing. Someone would have reached Jace. They would come.

“You’re drifting.” The chair jerked hard, both his hands on it, his face suddenly close, and the motion swung the room sickeningly. “Focus on me. I’ve waited more than a decade for this. You’ll be present for it.”