Chapter 43
Forty-Three
JACE
I’d been up since before dawn.
I’d slept only two hours, in pieces, surfacing each time to run another scenario and then forcing myself back under because exhaustion made for bad decisions, and I needed to be sharp.
Layla had been beside me for some of it, awake when I was awake, neither of us pretending otherwise, both of us staring at the ceiling and working our own versions of the same problem.
At some point before the light came up, she’d slipped out of bed, and I’d let her, because I understood the need to move when your mind wouldn’t stop.
Now I stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug of coffee going cold in my hand and watched her work.
She’d taken over the dining room. The table had been pushed against the wall and the chairs stacked on top of it, clearing a space in the center of the floor.
She moved through a slow, controlled sequence of forms. The same fluid practice I’d seen her run on the beach, the kind that wasn’t about fighting so much as it was about staying inside her own body.
The early light came through the east windows and caught her as she moved.
Her hair was loose. Her feet were bare on the hardwood.
Koa lay in the corner with his head up, focused on her as always, on duty even at rest.
I knew what I was looking at now in a way I hadn’t before.
I’d admired her competence from the first night on the beach, the way she carried herself, the economy of her movements.
She’d put me on my ass back at the gym, and something lit up that had no business lighting up in that moment.
But she’d been a stranger then—a woman named Layla Murphy with botanical sleeves and a service dog and a story she wouldn’t tell.
Now I watched her and saw the girl underneath.
Willa’s friend. The girl from the photographs, the one whose disappearance had cracked my sister’s life in half.
She was in there, in the line of the jaw and the set of the eyes.
I could see her now that I knew to look.
I could see, too, the exact shape of what had been done to her, because every bit of this discipline and control and lethal precision had been built out of the wreckage of a girl who hadn’t had any of it the night she walked into the woods to meet a boy.
She finished the sequence and crossed to the far end of the room, where I’d set up the target sometime around three in the morning when lying in bed had become intolerable.
There wasn’t much on the island to work with, but the garage had a stack of plywood sheets that got pressed into service every hurricane season for boarding up the windows and doors that didn’t already have custom hurricane panels.
I’d hauled several of them in and layered them against the wall, and I’d found a can of spray paint on the workbench and put a rough target on the face of it.
Concentric rings. A center mark. It wasn’t pretty. It would do.
She picked up one of her knives from where she’d lined them on the windowsill. Settled her weight. Threw.
The blade hit just left of center and stuck.
She retrieved it, walked back, and threw again.
Center this time. Again. Again. The rhythm of it was its own kind of meditation: the steady thunk of steel into wood, and I stood in the doorway and watched her do the thing she did to keep herself whole and thought about whether any of it would be enough.
That was the part I couldn’t put down.
She was formidable. She had trained herself into something most people would never want to face.
But Halston Ashmore didn’t fight people directly.
Men like Halston had other people do that for them, and the operation behind him had been running long enough and quiet enough to make a sloppy police chief disappear with a sniper’s bullet and a man in a medium-security prison die in an altercation nobody would ever question too hard.
All her preparation, all her skill, all her hard-won lethality—none of it would mean anything against the right rifle at the right distance.
The burden of that sat on me with a weight I hadn’t felt in years.
I’d kept other people alive in dangerous places, and I was good at it.
I’d learned to carry the responsibility without letting it crush me.
This was different. This had a name now.
Hers. And I had no intention of examining too closely the things I was already willing to do to make sure nothing happened to her.
I set the cold coffee on the counter and stepped out onto the deck.
The morning was gray and still, the Atlantic a metallic chop under low clouds. I pulled up the contact and hit call.
Two rings.
“Bit early, even for you,” Dax said.
“I need to redirect the ask.”
Something in my tone must have carried, because the easy edge left his voice. “Go.”
“Forget the broad family architecture for now. I still want it eventually, but the priority’s changed.
I need everything you can find on the son.
Halston Ashmore specifically. Travel records, financials, property, known associates.
Anything operational.” The gray water moved with the rhythmic pulse of the tide.
“If he’s been somewhere, I want to know.
If he’s connected to someone, I want the name. Whatever you can pull.”
Dax went quiet.
Not the quiet of a man waiting for me to continue.
The other quiet—the one that meant he’d already started pulling threads, that somewhere on the other end of the line he was looking at a screen, and his attention had narrowed to a point.
I’d heard that quiet a hundred times over the years and it never meant nothing.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked finally.
“A lot. None of it’s relevant to what you need to do.”
“Mm.” A pause. “This the same investigation as before?”
“Same investigation. Sharper focus.”
“And the urgency?”
“As real as it gets.”
The keys started moving on his end, that rapid, familiar clacking.
“I’ve already got some of his architecture from the family pull I was doing.
Give me a day to run him specifically. Maybe two.
” He paused, and the keys stopped. “Hollingsworth. The kind of thing you’re describing—if I find what it sounds like you think I’m going to find, you understand that’s not a thing you walk back.
Once you know, you know. And then you’re responsible for knowing. ”
I thought about the conversation I’d be having eventually with people above me.
The op I’d come here to run to identify the bigger fish I was supposed to be after, and the institutional machinery that had its own ideas about what mattered and what was acceptable to spend along the way.
There was a version of all of that conversation that would end with Halston Ashmore left alive and in place because of what he could lead to, what he could be turned into, and what bigger names sat above him in the structure.
Assuming he was part of the machinery and not simply a client.
I didn’t let the thought finish forming. The conversation hadn’t been had, and I hadn’t yet pinned Halston down.
“I understand,” I said.
“All right.” The keys started again. “I’ll call you.”
He was gone before I could answer.
I stood on the deck a moment longer, looking at the water, and then I went back inside.
Layla was still at it, the steady rhythm of the knives unbroken, each one finding its mark with a precision that had my blood heating. I ignored it. Now wasn’t the time.
I’d just picked my coffee back up, intending to dump the cold remnants and start over, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. The slow, unhurried shuffle of someone who wasn’t fully awake yet and wasn’t trying to be.
Willa came down in her robe, the flannel one she’d had since college that she refused to throw away, her caramel hair an absolute disaster and her hazel eyes still carrying most of the night in them.
She stopped beside me in the kitchen doorway and took in the scene with the unhurried patience of someone who had already accepted that her life was strange—the dining room cleared of everything that could be damaged, the plywood target propped against the far wall, the woman methodically burying knives in its center with mechanical calm while Koa sat a few feet back and supervised with the gravity of a dog who took his responsibilities seriously.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“So,” Willa said finally, her voice still rough with sleep. “You’re sleeping with one of my best friends.”
I gave her the side-eye.
She grinned—the first real grin I’d seen from her since before the party, broad and unguarded, the morning light coming through the kitchen window catching it in a way that made her look about sixteen. “You officially can no longer give me any grief about Sawyer.”
I reached over and tugged a piece of her disaster hair, gently enough that she didn’t swat me. “Understood.”
She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, and I let mine settle against the other side, and we stood there together as Layla threw.
The knives hit home one after another, that clean, solid sound repeating itself in the quiet of the morning, and for one suspended moment, the enormity of everything—the threat still sitting out there with Halston Ashmore’s name on it, the call I was waiting on, the weight of what Dax was going to find—pulled back just far enough to let something else through.
The possibility of an after. A version of all of this where the woman in the dining room got to put the knives down someday, where the thing she’d been running from for years finally stopped having teeth, where she got to stay.
Got to be part of the life we were all still figuring out how to build on this island, in whatever shape that eventually took.
I hadn’t let myself consider that possibility before.
It had felt like the kind of thing you didn’t examine too closely while it was still fragile.
But I let myself look at it now, just for a second, while my sister stood warm and half-asleep beside me and the morning came in through the windows and the knives hit home.
Then Layla turned, the last knife still quivering in the center of the target, and caught us both watching her. She didn’t say anything. The corner of her mouth kicked up in that small, private way it had, like she was keeping something back, and something in my chest pulled taut and then eased.
I held onto that feeling a moment longer before I let it go.