Chapter 12
Twelve
LAYLA
After lunch, Jace walked me back to the cottage.
I didn’t need company or protection. I had Koa for that.
But I didn’t mind the extra time with him.
Without him saying a word, I understood he was the epitome of capable, and it enabled me to let my guard down, just a fraction.
That was a rare enough occurrence that it felt almost restful.
Not something I had much experience with.
Once he’d left, I set up in the living room, with my laptop on the coffee table and Koa stretched out beside me on the sofa, nose to my knee.
I had a lot to do. The language of public records requests was its own particular dialect, formal and precise.
I’d written enough of them to move quickly, but it was still a lengthy list: meeting minutes from Miles Busby’s entire tenure as mayor; approved contracts and budget allocations; any documented partnerships with outside developers, including Albemarle Development Group; correspondence related to waterfront development projects.
I set up a spreadsheet to track them all, notating which county or municipal channel was the correct contact, and calculating follow-up dates to integrate with my digital calendar.
I decided to make a cup of tea before I dove in. Koa trailed me to the kitchen, focus on the treat bag on the counter with the dozen fancy dog biscuits from the bakery.
I eyed him. “Do you think you’ve been a good boy?”
“Woo!”
“The bestest boy?”
This time his yodel of agreement came with a stomp.
“It happens I agree with you.” Laughing, I dug a biscuit from the bag and put him through his paces. Sit. Down. Wait. Release.
By the time we’d finished, the electric kettle beeped. I doused a bag of oolong, set a timer, and kicked back to wait, absorbing the quiet of the cottage around me.
It was the kind of quiet that let things surface.
I was good at keeping a mental blockade in place.
At least for a while. Emotional control was essential in my line of work.
But I wasn’t unaffected. Everything I’d been pushing down since the meeting at Sutter House—the hold of a ship, the videos they’d mentioned, the evidence of a bigger machine that treated people as product—it was all still there, waiting patiently for exactly this sort of stillness to rise into.
I’d gotten good at not letting them take me under.
I wasn’t always good at not letting them in at all.
Koa made another soft “Woo,” and turned toward the front of the cottage.
Three seconds later, a knock sounded.
I wasn’t expecting anyone. My hand reached for a knife hilt at my back as I crossed to the door. Easing to one side, I checked the sidelight, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.
“Damn it,” I whispered.
I dropped my hand and pulled the door open.
The man on the other side was in his mid-fifties, broad through the shoulders, with a face that had never been particularly soft and had gotten less so over the years.
He’d been the one they assigned to me at the beginning, when I was sixteen years old, lying broken in a hospital bed, with no comprehension of what the rest of my life would look like.
He was the closest thing to a fixed point I’d had through all of it, and the look on his face right now was the look he got when he was frightened for me and furious about it.
He strode inside without being invited. “Your sister called me.”
“Of course she did.” I closed the door behind him. “Ashley has a big mouth.”
“Ashley has good sense.” Bruce turned to face me in the small living room, taking up most of the available space the way he always had. “What the hell are you thinking, Layla?”
“You’re aware of what I do for a living.”
“I’m well aware of what you do for a living. I’m also aware that you signed documentation to the effect that you would never come back to this area. It was part of the terms you agreed to when we set up your protection.”
“I know what I agreed to.”
“Do you?” He crossed his arms. The gesture was so familiar it almost made me want to smile. I didn’t let myself because it would piss him off, and he was mad enough as it was.
“You could have found a reason to turn this case down. Devon would have sent someone else.”
“Devon sent me.”
“Devon sent you because you said yes. Don’t hide behind that.” He studied me with the exhaustion of a man who had known me since high school and had very few illusions left. “You have no business being anywhere near this island. Not with the people who are still out there.”
“I’m well aware of the risks.”
“Are you?” His voice didn’t rise. It never did, which was somehow worse.
“Because you signed documentation, Layla. You agreed. And yet here you are, in the same county, working a case that is directly connected to the operation that—” He stopped himself.
Took a breath. “I can smooth this over if you come back with me now. You’ve technically already broken the agreement by being here, but if you leave today, I can make the argument that you didn’t know what the case was going to involve until you arrived. It’s thin, but it’ll hold. Probably.”
I looked at him for a long moment. Koa had planted himself at my left side. He’d met Bruce McCormick before, but he watched the man with the calm, evaluative attention he gave to everyone until he decided they were safe.
“I can’t leave,” I said.
“Layla.”
“I thought just coming here would be enough. I thought I’d get off the ferry and walk around the village and feel whatever I needed to feel, and then I could go home and be done with it.” I kept my voice level. “That’s not what happened.”
“What happened is that you came back to a place where you are actively at risk and inserted yourself into an investigation that is directly connected to the people who—”
“I know who they are.” At least insofar as the threat to me was concerned.
“Then you know what they’re capable of.”
“I know better than almost anyone what they’re capable of.
” The words came out harder than I’d intended.
I made myself soften them. “That’s exactly why I can’t leave.
Something changed. There are new avenues that weren’t there before, new people looking with resources and connections I don’t have on my own.
This is the closest anyone has gotten in years. I can’t walk away from that.”
He stared at me. For a long moment the only sound was the wind off the water hissing against the cottage windows and Koa’s steady breathing.
“If you stay,” he said finally, “you’re ending the agreement.
The protection goes with it. No backup. No resources.
No cavalry if it goes sideways.” He held my gaze steadily.
“I need you to hear me when I say that. The moment you make this choice, I cannot help you. Not because I don’t want to. Because my hands will be tied.”
“I understand that.”
“Do you really?” Bruce looked at me the way he had when I was young and terrified and had no idea who I was going to be on the other side of all of it. “Because I’m asking you—I’m begging you—not to put me in that position. Not to put yourself in it.”
I thought about the posters in every window on Front Street.
About Willa’s face when she talked about the boat, and Gabi’s knee bouncing, and Rios sitting in that room carrying the lingering scars of being the island’s convenient villain.
About all of them still here, still looking, still refusing to let her become just a name in a cold case file.
And underneath all of it, the thing I never said out loud to anyone, the thing that had been sitting in my chest since I got off the ferry and walked onto the sand of this island and felt the quality of the air here that was like nowhere else in the world.
“I can’t leave,” I said again. “I knew that before I got on the ferry. I think I’ve known it for a long time.”
Bruce stared at me for a long, hard moment. His face shifted—not to defeat exactly, more the acceptance of someone who had run out of arguments they’d believed would work.
“I can’t throw you over my shoulder and drag you out of here,” he said. “Much as I’d like to right now.”
“I know.”
“If you’re really determined to continue on this path, then I need you to promise me something.” He uncrossed his arms. “You do not take unnecessary risks. You keep your head down and your training sharp. You use every bit of sense you have, which is considerable when you’re not being stubborn.”
“I’m always being stubborn.”
“I know that, too.” He looked at Koa. “And you keep that dog with you every minute.”
“That was never going to change.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the room and pulled me into a hug that was brief and fierce and said everything he hadn’t been able to say out loud in all these years as my handler, through all the check-ins and the moves and the new name and the careful construction of a life that was real even when it was built on a foundation of necessary fiction. I held on.
When he stepped back, his jaw was set, and his eyes were doing the thing they did when he was feeling something he didn’t intend to show.
“You call me,” he said. “Anything goes wrong, anything seems off, you call me. I won’t be able to come, but I can maybe point you toward someone who can.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Layla.”
He did.
“Thank you, Bruce.”
He held my gaze for a long time, as if he were trying to memorize every feature of my face. The face he’d been the first to see after the surgeons had done their work, repairing the visible signs of what had been broken. Then he went to the door.
“Take care of yourself,” he ordered.
“Promise.”
The door closed behind him.
I stood in the middle of the cottage and listened to his car start and pull away. I sat down on the couch. Koa climbed half into my lap, seeming to understand, as he always did, that I needed full canine weighted blanket mode to get through this.
I wrapped my arms around his thick neck, pressed my face into his fur, and absorbed the full weight of what I’d just chosen.