Carry on Wayward Son (Wayward Sons #6)

Prologue

JACE

The place had no business looking the way it did.

Fieldstone and tall windows. A circular drive lined with boxwoods somebody trimmed on a schedule.

A fountain burbled in the center of it, water sliding down three tiers into a basin thick with copper coins, wishes tossed by people who came here and left without whoever they’d brought.

From the road, you’d take it for a spa. A boutique hotel for the kind of money my family threw at problems to make them disappear.

Nothing about the manicured lawn said my sister had spent two years locked behind those windows.

Against her will. While our parents looked me in the eye and sold me a boarding school lie. Friends up north she liked so well she’d rather spend Christmas with them than come home. Willa’s thriving, Jace. Willa’s found her people.

I’d swallowed it. Semester after semester, I’d swallowed every word.

She’d nearly drowned two summers back, and they’d committed her to a psychiatric facility and lied to my face about it. The wrongness of that sat in my gut like something I’d eaten that meant to kill me.

I didn’t have the full story yet. Not the how or the why or the what had been done to her.

Willa’s letter had given me one thing, and that thing was plenty.

Two pages, in handwriting that shook, under the fear and the careful hedging a girl put in when she thought people read her mail, a single message came through clearly.

Get me out.

I’d read it twice in the mailroom, walked past the lecture I was supposed to attend, past the fraternity my father wore like a birthright and expected me to wear the same, and I’d gotten in my car and driven straight through to this well-manicured prison..

I killed the engine and scrubbed both hands through my hair, attempting to smooth down the hours of worry during the drive. Then I put on the face I’d been raised to wear, the one that assumed every room already belonged to it, and I went inside.

The lobby smelled of lilies and lemon polish. A woman behind a curved desk lifted her head and offered me the smile they must train into the staff, warm and weatherproof.

“Jace Hollingsworth.” I set my hands on the counter with the ease of a man who’d done this a hundred times. “I’m here to check out my sister. Wilhelmina Hollingsworth.”

The smile held its temperature. The receptionist’s eyes flicked to a screen, then back. “Let me get someone who can help you with that, Mr. Hollingsworth. One moment.”

The moment stretched. I filled it with the view of hedges through the window and the steady work of keeping my rabbiting pulse off my face.

The man who came was silver at the temples and soft in the middle, wearing a cardigan and a lanyard with some kind of ID. He extended a hand, and I took it.

“I’m the clinical director. You’re Wilhelmina’s brother.” He said her whole name like a man reading it off a chart. “I have to be honest with you. We’re not certain a discharge serves Wilhelmina’s interests at this stage of her treatment.”

My molars ground together. She’d hated that name since she was old enough to say it. Willa. Only ever Willa. Every syllable of Wilhelmina out of this man’s mouth told me exactly how well they’d known the girl they’d kept locked up all this time.

I kept my voice level. Even managed to inject a little warmth.

“She’s got a birthday next week. My parents want her home for it.

” I drew my wallet, handed my license to him and let him match the name to the face.

“They sent me to bring her. You’re going to tell me it’s not in her interest to spend her own birthday with her family? ”

His mouth worked around a few phrases that meant no without saying it. Protocols. Care teams. The importance of continuity. I let him talk, and I held his gaze, unblinking, because a Hollingsworth in a room expected to win it, and two decades of my father’s training were finally worth something.

“One week,” I said. “She’ll be back in your care after. You have my word, and you have my parents’ name on every check that clears through this place.”

That last part landed where I aimed it.

He excused himself to make a call I couldn’t hear. Then he came back and told me they’d bring her down.

So I waited.

I waited past the point where waiting turned to something colder.

I watched the burble of the fountain and mentally ran through everything I’d say if they came back down the hall without her.

If a phone rang at that desk with my mother’s voice on the other end of it.

Or, worse, my father’s. Fifteen minutes.

Twenty. My collar went damp. I kept my face bored and my hands loose as I leaned on the counter, choking on impatience.

Then the elevator opened at the end of the hall. An orderly wheeled my sister out, and the bottom dropped out of my world.

They’d put her in a chair. That gutted me first, before I’d taken in the rest. Willa, who ran the beach barefoot till the soles of her feet turned to leather, who’d swim past the second sandbar on a dare and laugh at you for worrying. They’d wheeled her out like she couldn’t carry her own weight.

Two years had bled the color out of her.

Her skin had gone the gray-white of someone the sun had forgotten.

Her caramel hair hung lank past her shoulders, with none of the shine I remembered.

The bones stood too sharp in her face, and the sockets of her eyes sat dark and bruised and sunken.

She’d lost weight she’d never had to lose.

How? The word beat through me and drew blood on every pass. How did I not know? How did I sit in a lecture hall four hundred miles away and believe the lies? How did I read her name on a Christmas card in my mother’s hand and never once demand to hear her voice?

Then Willa’s eyes found mine.

Something lit behind them, fever-bright, hope so fierce it hurt to look at. “Jace!”

She came out of that chair before the orderly could stop her, rocketed across the space between us, and threw both arms around me.

She held on with a strength that had no right to live in a body that thin.

Fierce. Fiercer. Her fingers dug into my back like she’d fall off the edge of the world if she let go.

I wrapped her up, feeling every rib, and swore an oath I didn’t say out loud.

One bag had fallen to the floor when she’d launched herself. One. Small enough to carry in a single hand. Two years of a life, and they’d let her pack it into something I could’ve fit under an airplane seat.

I had to force a swallow past the knot in my throat.

She picked up the bag.

“We’ll see you next week.” I settled my arm around her shoulders and gave the director my father’s easy smile, the one that closed deals. “Soon as the birthday’s behind us. Thank you for taking such good care of her.”

I squeezed Willa’s shoulder twice. Pressed my thumb once, hard, against her arm.

Old code, the kind we’d built as kids sitting through our parents’ dinners, and I watched her understand it.

Watched her school the hope off her face and give the room a wan nod.

My sister, who’d figured out inside two seconds that I was lying through my teeth and matched me beat for beat.

Because I wasn’t the only one who’d learned the lessons of being a Hollingsworth.

I walked her out through the whisper of lilies and lemon polish and into the daylight

I didn’t breathe right until I got her buckled into the passenger seat. She kept both hands wrapped around that one little bag, knuckles white on it, watching the building over her shoulder like it might come after her.

“Look at me.” I waited until she did. “You’re never going back there. Not next week. Not ever. You hear me?”

Her chin trembled. She pressed her lips flat against it and nodded.

“For now, you come back to school with me. You can stay at my place while I sort the rest of it out. Nobody gets to you there.” I pulled onto the road and put the building behind us for good. “After that, wherever you want. You tell me where, and that’s where we go. Where do you want to be?”

“Home.” No hesitation. The first sure thing she’d said. “Hatterwick. I want to see Gabi. I want to see Gwen.” Her voice climbed toward something almost alive. “I want my life back, Jace. I want my whole life back.”

Gwen.

The name shot into me like a fist under the ribs.

She didn’t know.

Two years locked in that place with her mail read—if she even got mail—her phone gone, and her whole world narrowed to whatever our parents chose to let through.

Nobody had told her. She didn’t know Gwen Busby had vanished off the island the same night the water almost took her.

She didn’t know about the search parties, or the dogs, or the empty grief the whole island still carried.

She sat there with her sunken eyes lit up over a girl who’d been gone two years, saying her best friend’s name like she’d pick up the phone tomorrow.

My hands tightened on the wheel.

One thing at a time. I’d get food in her first. Something that wasn’t served on a tray. Real clothes, more than fit in that bag. I’d give her a day of feeling human before I took the earth out from under her a second time.

Somewhere between here and home, I’d find the words to break her world open again, without breaking her along with it.