Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
JACE
I had to work not to grind my teeth. I’d had to work harder the entire time we’d stood with my father as he assessed Layla for her potential.
Because women weren’t people to him. They were assets to be used.
It was how he’d treated my mother for more than thirty years.
How he’d treated Willa until she’d taken herself far enough away that they couldn’t touch her anymore.
And looking at him now, I saw what I hadn’t let myself see in considering his potential involvement in all of this.
A man who believed women were less. More, a man who believed they were something to be owned.
I couldn’t understand that kind of entitlement. An entitlement that could well lead to someone making investments in profitable ventures targeting other equally entitled asswipes.
He was a legitimately horrible person. But did that make him a part of this? I was still sifting through the possibilities when something changed in the woman beside me.
Not a sound. Not a movement. Something in the air pressure.
I’d made a career of reading rooms, and part of that was reading the people you trusted at your side, knowing their baseline well enough that a deviation registered before you understood the why of it.
Layla’s baseline was contained and watchful, with the steady, even breath of someone who had learned to keep the body from telegraphing the mind. That breath changed subtly.
I’d spent countless hours memorizing her face in concentration, in worry, in fury, in passion. What I saw now was all her careful control running at full capacity and straining. Something underneath was leaking out, not visible to anyone who hadn’t been watching her for weeks. Visible to me.
I tracked her line of sight across the room.
A man in his late thirties, champagne in hand, worked the crowd with the practiced ease of a host who owned the room he stood in.
Halston Ashmore. I’d last seen him the spring of my sophomore year when he graduated.
He’d looked different by then, the scars from the reconstruction work mostly settled, the story about the car accident already filed and forgotten by everyone, including me.
He looked different again now. More complete, somehow.
The kind of maintenance that happened when you had unlimited resources and enough vanity to use them to continue to erase imperfections.
His gaze was fixed on Layla with the look of a man whose attention had been snagged by something fascinating, and he intended to keep looking until he understood what it was.
Every hair on my body stood up as I remembered where I’d seen that look before.
This was a mistake. Everything about tonight had been a mistake. She was in danger.
I didn’t think after that. Thinking was too slow. Shifting my weight into her space, I dropped my head toward her ear, keeping my voice so low it was barely sound at all. “I’ve got you. We’re getting out of here.”
She exhaled one single controlled breath, and then I turned us both with the smile I put on when I wanted people to draw a particular conclusion, saying something to the couple nearest us about making an early night of it in the tone that made early night mean something specific, and I got us moving toward the door at the pace of two people with somewhere better to be.
I kept my hand at the small of her back and felt her working to stay loose under my palm, all that training keeping her body from doing what it wanted to do. I kept my face easy and my eyes on the room and got us out.
On the drive back, I watched the mirrors, taking a circuitous route even though on an island this small it would take next to no effort for someone to get the information on where she was staying.
Nothing obvious behind us, no headlights that followed through both turns, no car that appeared twice.
Either I was overreacting, or whoever was following was professional enough not to be visible.
I didn’t know yet which of those was true, so I kept checking.
Beside me, Layla looked straight ahead and said nothing. I heard her teeth chattering, saw the tremble in her shoulders as her control slipped enough to let some of the fear bleed out, and I cursed myself eight ways from Sunday for having taken her with me and put her at risk.
As soon as we reached the cottage, I hustled her inside and immediately locked the door.
Koa was right there to greet us. He took one glance at her, and his whole manner shifted to the focused attention and press of his working posture.
Her fingers curled into his fur automatically, but still she shook.
“Protège-la,” I ordered Koa.
His ears flicked toward me, but his focus stayed on Layla.
I forced myself to methodically clear the cottage, checking that the front and back doors and every single window were locked.
I dropped and closed every blind in the place to limit the sightline of anyone outside.
When I’d done the full circuit, I filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and brought it to her where she still stood in the entryway.
She drained it.
“We didn’t have to leave so early.” Her voice was careful. Composed.
“I got what I needed.”
She didn’t ask what that was. She looked at the empty glass in her hands, and I watched her decide not to ask.
“C’mon.” Gently, I nudged her toward the living room and the sofa. “Sit.”
She collapsed more than sat, her shoulders curled in a self-protective posture I absolutely hated. Koa leapt up beside her, draping across her lap. She didn’t quite meet my eyes as I studied her face. It was more than simply discomfort with me seeing her vulnerability.
The picture had been building in my mind for weeks, and I’d let myself avoid completing it because completion meant asking, and asking meant she’d have to answer or refuse to, and either way something would change that I hadn’t been ready for.
I wasn’t sure I was ready now.
“I need to ask you something.”
She swallowed. “What?”
“Why isn’t there a file about your case?”
She stilled.
“There’s no missing persons report. No record of a girl taken from anywhere up the coast that matches your description in the right window of time.
And you said your dad is in law enforcement.
You have siblings. You have people.” I kept my voice even, the voice I used when I needed someone to stay with me rather than run from what I was saying.
“That means you aren’t one of the ones who slipped through the cracks like the others.
So why is there no case file for you, Layla? ”
The silence stretched. Koa whined.
“Because my dad, my siblings—they’re not my blood family.” Her voice stayed quiet and completely without self-pity. “They’re the family I made after. The family I chose.”
It landed the way truth landed. Not as a revelation, because I’d already suspected the shape of it, but as confirmation—a piece clicking into the frame and the frame becoming a picture.
I sat with that for a moment before continuing. “Who is Halston Ashmore to you?”
She blinked. “Who?”
She was good at dissemination, but I didn’t see any tells that she recognized the name.
“The man you were looking at at the party. Who is he to you?”
I saw the fear try to take hold again, the full body response she worked to contain, and I didn’t make her answer it. I kept going.
“I’ll tell you who he is to me. A rich, entitled jackwipe.
And also a fraternity brother of mine. One who was out of school for a big chunk of a semester recovering from a car crash.
That’s what they told us. And when he came back, he had a bunch of scars.
We didn’t ask about it, because of course you don’t do that.
Not of the frat president. He graduated my sophomore year, and I didn’t give him another thought until we uncovered his connection to the island in those property records.
But he’s been stuck in my brain ever since, and I couldn’t figure out why.
Until tonight. Until you. Because you know what I think, Layla?
I think you know something about those scars on his face.
I think he knows something about the scars on your hands and arms. How am I doing? ”
I didn’t need her to answer. I saw it in the way she held herself together, the effort of it, the expression of someone who’d been carrying something alone for a very long time and now stood at the edge of being able to put it down.
She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, something had shifted. The exhaustion of the long hold finally winning out over the instinct to keep it locked down.
“I was bought for him.” Her voice was level and distant in a way I recognized from Willa, when she separated herself from the content of what she was saying in order to survive the saying of it.
“A present. A plaything. A pet. Something he could use or abuse at his whim. He made that very clear when I was presented to him.”
Something cold moved through my chest and lower to curdle in my gut, and I held myself completely still lest the rage and horror spill over.
“He picked me specifically, out of all the others. I was kept crated for weeks.” The same flatness, the same distance.
She was somewhere else while she said it, some internal room she’d built for exactly this purpose.
“Treated like an animal. He had a knife and liked to threaten me with it. He believed he was wearing me down until I’d be compliant. ”
I remembered the dog crate at the shelter and the way she’d gone white. I held all that inside me, keeping my face open. Listening.
“I was busy breaking off a piece of the wire crate.” Something shifted in her voice then, the first hint of the person who’d been in that cage rather than the person narrating it from a distance.
“It wasn’t huge. A section of heavy gauge wire, maybe four or five inches long.
Not much of a weapon, but it was all I could access.
” A pause. “And I knew he was getting impatient. So the next time he came, I acquiesced. Promised to behave if only I could get out and stretch my legs. Shower. He smiled this triumphant smile and came to let me out, knife in hand.”
I was going to find him. That thought struck me with a clarity and coldness that I recognized as the place I went when things got very simple. I set it aside. Not now. Now I needed to keep listening.
“I saw it. Knew what he’d likely do to me if I missed.
But this was my one shot. I was getting weaker by the day, and anything was better than staying in that cage.
” She looked at her hands, at the scars running from the knuckles toward the wrists, at the botanical ink that had grown over and around them.
“When he opened the door and his guard was down, I struck. I went for his eye and missed by a little. Tore open his cheek. He was furious and came after me with the knife.” She stopped.
“I don’t remember much after that. I didn’t feel the cuts on my arms. I just kept fighting, hitting whatever I could with the wire.
Eventually, he dropped the knife. I managed to grab it and turned it on him.
” A long pause. “When I left that house, I was certain he was dead. Because I knew if I didn’t kill him, I’d never be free. ”
The sound she made lived in the same neighborhood as a laugh and had nothing in common with one. “I’m still not free. If I’d known he was still alive—if I’d known I could run into him—I would never have come back here.”
I stood very still for a long moment.
Twelve years of doing the work I’d done.
Twelve years of following the architecture of operations like the one that had produced Halston Ashmore, tracking the money and the networks and the men at the top of them and handing the intelligence to people with the jurisdiction to act on it.
I’d understood the machinery abstractly and operationally and in every way that the work required me to understand it.
I had never stood in a room with someone who had survived it and listened to them tell me what it had actually cost. Not like this.
I crossed to her. Slowly, so she saw me coming, so there was nothing sudden in it. I raised my hand and held it near her face for a moment, giving her the chance to move away, and when she didn’t, I cupped her cheek carefully in my palm.
She was warm. She was here. She was looking at me with eyes full of exhaustion and terror and something else beneath all of it. Something that had been there for weeks and that I was only now understanding the full weight of.
“But you couldn’t stay away from your real life any longer, could you, Gwen?”