Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
LAYLA
The house didn’t fit the island.
Most of the homes on Hatterwick were built with practical, barrier-island construction—everything elevated on pilings, built low and sturdy against weather that arrived with opinions, with weathered clapboard and metal roofs and the general understanding that the island would have its way with whatever you put on it, and you might as well account for that from the start.
Even the larger vacation homes held the modesty of people who understood the ocean was in charge.
This house had not gotten the memo.
A modern monstrosity of glass and steel, it was built to a scale reading as a statement, elevated on pilings like everything else but the pilings themselves were somehow architectural, lit from below and incorporated into the design so the whole structure seemed to float above the dune.
The damned thing probably cost more to build than the rest of the block combined and was definitely designed by someone who’d never wintered here and didn’t intend to.
Someone who wasn’t concerned if Mother Nature pitched a tantrum and washed it into the ocean because they had enough money to build something all over again.
I didn’t recognize it from before. Not that I’d registered every big house I’d seen the last time I’d been here, but I would’ve remembered the wrongness of the style next to the pastel jewels marching along the coast.
The edgy quiet on the drive over was a far cry from the comfortable working silence we’d developed over weeks of sitting across tables from each other.
I understood Jace’s relationship with his dad was complicated, so I let him have the silence.
Let him armor up in whatever way he needed to get through this party.
When we parked and got out, he offered his arm without comment. I slipped my hand through the crook of his elbow and offered a squeeze of encouragement before we went up the stairs.
Inside, the party was already going full tilt.
The wide, lavish rooms had been arranged with the obvious intention of illustrating that cost was not a consideration.
Bar service moved through the crowd with the silent efficiency of a staff paid well to be invisible, a pianist in the far corner played jazz calibrated to fade into the background without competing with conversation, flowers that had come a hell of a lot further than the mainland were arranged in low centerpieces on every surface.
The guests were exactly what you’d expect of a house like this.
I’d always hated this kind of room. Not because I didn’t understand it—I understood it far better than I ever wanted to—but because of what I understood.
These were the rooms where the men who funded operations like the one that took every girl who wouldn’t be missed moved through the world openly and easily and without consequence.
They didn’t think of themselves as those men.
That was the thing. They’d long since separated the money from what the money did, the way you separated the hand signing a check from whatever the check paid for.
They believed at some cellular level that the world was divided into people who mattered and people who were available.
Never once had they questioned that division or which side of it they fell on.
Standing in this room with my water glass and my upswept hair, I knew I was the only person here who understood what such a belief actually produced when you followed it to its end.
Jace’s hand was warm at the small of my back as we moved through the first cluster of guests, and I kept my face arranged in the pleasant, engaged version of me that had learned long ago how to be in rooms like this without actually being in rooms like this.
I watched him navigate it with the fluency of someone who’d grown up speaking this language, even if he’d chosen not to use it, and underneath the social ease I could feel the different operation he was running.
He was tracking something. Or someone. Maybe multiple someones. My job was to remain decorative and attentive, to pick up on the things he might miss.
A man separated from a nearby group and crossed toward us.
Tall. Silver-haired. Carrying himself with the settled ease of someone who’d spent decades being given what he wanted and stopped noticing when it wasn’t universally available.
I saw Jace’s jaw, Jace’s cheekbones. Even his eyes moved through a room the same way, assessing the machinery running beneath a warm social surface.
He was what Jace might have become if Jace had made entirely different choices about what to do with himself and what to do to other people.
“Jace.” The warmth was calibrated precisely. A tool deployed with expertise rather than an expression of genuine affection. “You look well. It’s been too long.”
“Dad.” Jace’s voice was even in a way I knew required effort. “Good to see you.”
The tension moving through his arm wasn’t the complicated weight of a difficult relationship.
I’d felt that in him before. The heaviness of something unresolved, the grief of a person who’d expected more from someone and stopped expecting it but hadn’t stopped feeling the gap.
This was different. More focused. He was watching his father the way I watched witnesses when I suspected they were managing the truth, looking for the tells underneath what was being shown.
I understood without being told that whatever Dax had sent him for Christmas had added a layer to this evening, and I didn’t have the full picture yet.
John Hollingsworth turned to me, and the warmth redistributed itself across his face with the seamlessness of long practice. “And who is this?”
“Layla Murphy.” I gave him my hand. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“All flattering, I hope.” He held my hand a beat past the natural end of a handshake. Just enough to register. Not enough to call out. The exact amount a man like this knew he could get away with, which told me something about how much he’d it tested over the years.
“Of course.” My smile gave him nothing.
“Layla Murphy.” He repeated my name in the way men repeated names when they were filing them. “What is it you do?”
“Photojournalist. Investigative work, mostly.”
“Remarkable.” The word landed as an appraisal rather than a compliment. His eyes moved over me once, brief and practiced. “Jace has always had excellent taste.”
Not she seems wonderful. Not it’s lovely to meet you. Taste. As though I were something he’d selected off a dinner menu.
I smiled pleasantly and said nothing.
“How long have you known Mr. Ashmore?” Nothing in Jace’s delivery telegraphed the importance of the question.
“Oh, a few decades now. We crossed paths through the development space. A mutual contact introduced us.” John’s warmth shifted register slightly, the warmth he reserved for people he considered genuinely useful.
“Remarkable man. Considerable vision. The kind of reach that takes generations to build.” He paused.
“You should spend some time with him tonight. There are opportunities along this coast well worth knowing about.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Are you still with the Navy?” The question was wrapped in the language of paternal interest and was really about something else entirely.
“Still active, yes.”
“Mm.” John turned his glass in his hand. “You’ve been home a while now. I’d heard months.”
It had actually been only weeks, but Jace didn’t correct him.
“The island needed some attention.”
“Of course.” John paused. “I only ask because there are things opening up. Development projects that would benefit from someone with your particular skill set and your family’s history here. If you were ever thinking about the next chapter—”
“I appreciate that,” Jace said. “I’ll give it some thought.”
John looked at him for a moment with the eyes that were Jace’s eyes and weren’t, and then he smiled. “That’s all I ask.” He turned to me one more time. “Lovely to meet you, Layla. Take care of him.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
He moved back into the crowd with the ease of a man who had gotten at least some of what he came for, and the tension in Jace’s arm didn’t release completely. It redistributed, settled in the way of a man putting something away to deal with later.
I turned slightly toward Jace and kept my voice under the noise of the room. “Steady there, Golden Boy.”
He exhaled once. Controlled. Deliberate.
Some of the iron went out of him, and he glanced at me sideways with a mix of gratitude and the awareness of being seen and the slight irritation of a man who would rather not have needed either, all of it in a single glance lasting about a second before he put it away too.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“Later,” I said. “We’ll debrief later.”
He nodded, picked up a champagne glass from a passing tray, and turned back to the room. I turned with him and let my attention go where it was trained to go. Methodical, unhurried, the slow sweep of a space I catalogued for purposes I didn’t yet fully understand.
The party had reached its full rhythm. The crowd had thickened since we arrived.
The noise level had risen with it, the clusters of conversation shifting and reforming as people worked the room.
The pianist transitioned into something with more movement.
Bar service moved in smooth arcs through the crowd.
The whole thing had the expensive, frictionless quality of an event where every variable had been controlled in advance.
I was tracking the body language of a conversation across the room when a laugh distracted me.
Full-throated and assured, it was the laugh of a man who understood that laughter was a form of currency in rooms like this and spent it freely because he had an inexhaustible supply.
Every room he’d ever been in had laughed when he laughed.
Every room had arranged itself around him.
Something in my hindbrain registered the sound before my conscious mind caught up. Some long dormant animal layer that I’d spent years working to quiet, came suddenly and completely awake.
He stood perhaps forty feet away, working a cluster of guests with the practiced ease of a host who understood that the real work of a party was the circulation.
Impeccably dressed, champagne held loosely at his side, laughing at something a man beside him said and touching his shoulder as he laughed, the easy physicality of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin and in every room he’d ever occupied.
Somewhere in his late thirties. Well-maintained in the way serious money maintained people.
Well-rested. The kind of man who’d never once gone to sleep worrying about what the next day would cost him.
My gaze moved to his face and catalogued what it found.
The small pucker of scar tissue beside his right eye, pale and old, worked into the landscape of his skin so carefully that you’d have to know to look for it.
The hairline scar along his jaw, barely visible under foundation that had been applied by someone who knew what they were doing, the seam of it almost lost in the natural shadow of the bone.
The way the skin near his left temple sat fractionally differently from the skin around it, the signature of reconstruction, the ghost of a graft that the best surgeons in the world had worked to make invisible and had nearly succeeded.
He was laughing. His hands were moving. Someone said something that made the cluster around him lean in.
The party continued. The pianist played. Jace said something at my shoulder that I registered as sound without processing as words.
The glass in my hand was cold. I was aware of Koa not being here, of the knives strapped to my thighs under the dress, of every exit I’d clocked when we came in and the distance to each of them.
I knew this face.
Not this face. This face had been rebuilt with extraordinary skill and considerable expense, motivated by something I now understood with a completeness that felt like the floor dropping away.
But underneath the reconstruction, in the architecture of bone and proportion that no surgeon could entirely remake, I knew it.
I’d been close enough to it in the dark of a night to have pressed a knife against that jaw and used it, and I had believed every day since that the work I’d done had been permanent.
He was supposed to be dead.
I had built Layla Murphy on that reality.
Every choice, every risk, every carefully layered year of a life constructed from the ground up had been built on the single certain foundation that he was dead, and I had made him so.
I’d stopped looking over my shoulder because of it.
I’d come back to this island because of it, believing the danger was elsewhere, that whoever was at the top of this had a face I didn’t know yet.
I knew his face.
He was alive and standing twenty feet away and laughing and the room was full of people who had no idea what he was. And I was standing perfectly still with my water glass and my upswept hair and nothing showing on my face because there was nothing else available to me right now.
He turned from the cluster he’d been working.
His eyes moved through the room with the slow, proprietary ease of a man surveying what was his, touching each corner with the satisfaction of ownership.
They reached me.
And stopped.