Chapter 44
Forty-Four
LAYLA
I was steadier now. The knives always did that for me: the rhythm of them, the way they demanded just enough of my attention to crowd out everything else.
Bless Jace for thinking of it. For knowing, somehow, that it would help when I’d lain next to him in the dark and worked the problem from every angle until the angle started repeating.
I wished I could go for a run. Eight miles up the beach in the gray morning, the kind of distance that emptied me out and let me start over.
But I understood why a run wasn’t sensible right now.
A predictable route, an open beach, a woman alone—I’d taught classes on exactly why that was a bad idea.
So I stayed inside, and I drank my coffee, and I watched the horses.
A handful of them milled down on the beach below the dune line, clustered in the loose way they did when the morning was calm and there was nothing to spook them.
I’d missed them on Orcas. In all the years away, in all the careful construction of a new life in a place I’d genuinely come to love, the wild horses had been one of the pieces of home that never stopped tugging at me.
Something about the sight of them had always made my heart skip.
They belonged to no one. They answered to no one.
They ran the north end of this island because it was theirs and always had been.
I envied them that. The freedom of it.
It was a freedom Willa was protecting. She was turning the whole north end of the island into a wildlife sanctuary, writing the grants and fighting the fights to make it real, so the horses would have this stretch of sand and grass for as long as the island stood.
And if that wasn’t the most Willa thing I’d ever heard, I didn’t know what was.
The girl who’d been caged by her own family had grown into a woman who spent her life making sure other living things stayed free.
I wondered if I’d ever be able to think of this place as a sanctuary again. If we’d actually get to the bottom of all of it. If we’d find the chink in the armor, the thread to pull, the thing that would finally bring down Halston Ashmore and whatever sat above him.
It was a strange thing to picture him alive.
Somewhere on this island, probably in the glass monstrosity on the south end, drinking his coffee the way I was drinking mine.
For fourteen years I’d carried the weight of his death.
I’d never regretted it. There’d never been a question in my mind that it was kill or be killed, that the girl in the cage had done the only thing she could do to survive.
But I’d carried the knowledge that I’d ended a life to save my own all the same.
The police had never confirmed it. After my escape, I’d staggered through the unfamiliar city, trying to get as far from that cage as possible.
Eventually, I’d passed out. A good samaritan had found me and gotten me to the hospital.
But I’d been so traumatized, I’d never been able to give police a clear description of where I’d been held.
Honestly, the idea that he’d died in that nightmare basement and never been found had been a comfort to me. As if I’d managed to close a door on that part of my life.
And now it turned out I hadn’t killed him after all. There was a strange, cold relief in that. I didn’t actually wear the stain I’d thought I wore.
Not that it changed what I’d do. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I’d make sure it took this time, if that was what it came to. If it would keep me and others like me safe.
Had there been others since me? Was Halston a regular customer of whoever ran all this, working his way through girls the way he worked a room at a party? Or had I been special somehow, the way Jace kept circling back to?
I couldn’t fathom why I would have been.
I’d been fifteen. A child. My curves back then had leaned more toward baby fat than anything a man would call a figure.
I’d been average in nearly every measurable way—average looks, average height, better-than-average grades but nothing like my cousin’s academic accolades.
But Halston had never looked at me like I was average.
He’d looked at me with avarice. With ownership.
He’d gotten off on it. Not on me, not really, but on the fact of his control, the totality of it, the knowledge that he held every single thing about my world in his hands and could do whatever he wanted with it.
So maybe it had never been about what I looked like at all.
Maybe it had only ever been about what he could do, and to whom, and the fact that no one would stop him.
He wouldn’t get the chance to do it again. Not to me. I’d trained too long and too hard to ever be taken unaware the way that girl had been. And Jace—
Jace would rain down hell itself on anyone who tried.
I loved him for that. I let myself acknowledge it, standing at the window with the horses below me.
I loved him for the way he’d looked at me last night when the truth came out.
No rejection in it, no judgment, not a flicker of him deciding I was broken or ruined or lessened by what I’d been forced to do to survive.
He’d looked at me and seen strength. He admired it.
He’d built a target out of plywood in the middle of the night so I’d have somewhere to put the fear.
As if summoned by the thought, he came up behind me. I felt him before I heard him, my body reacting to his warmth because I seemed to have a sixth sense for where he was in a room. His arms slid around my waist, and he settled his chin near my shoulder and looked out the window with me.
I relaxed back into him.
That part still amazed me. That my body, which had spent years treating every point of contact as a threat to be assessed, simply softened into his without consulting me first. I’d spent so long being careful.
And here I was, leaning back against a man and watching wild horses and letting myself be held.
If someone had come back from the future to tell fifteen-year-old Gwen Busby that one day Golden Boy Jace Hollingsworth would be her lover—that he’d hold her in a kitchen at dawn and look at her like she hung the stars—she’d have laughed them straight out the door.
Jace Hollingsworth had been Willa’s untouchable older brother, entirely out of reach, the subject of exactly the kind of hopeless teenage daydream that had no business surviving everything that came after.
But here we were.
I didn’t know where we were going. I didn’t know what the future held, for him or for me, or for whatever this was between us. But I knew I hoped he was in it. That was as far as I’d let myself dream, and even that felt like more than I had any right to.
He pressed a kiss to my temple and didn’t say anything as we stood there together until the moment finished on its own.
Gabi arrived first.
She came through the door, predictably laden with bags of food, announcing as she came that Daniel had gone up to the Coast Guard station at Nags Head to check in with his superiors and would be back by afternoon.
Willa was already at the counter with a bowl of black-eyed peas soaking in water, because apparently we were ringing in the new year right regardless of the fact that we were also strategizing how to keep me alive.
I kind of loved them for the way they clung to the normal, made room for the ritual, refused to let the threat take the whole of the day. Black-eyed peas for luck and bacon for breakfast, and the world’s troubles could wait until everyone was fed.
“You’re on onions,” Willa told me, pointing at a cutting board. “Since you’re the knife expert.”
I laughed. I actually laughed, the sound surprising me. “I think I can handle that.”
So I chopped onions while Willa got bacon going in a cast-iron skillet, and Gabi unpacked enough food to feed three times our number, and the kitchen filled with the smells of it.
The talk around me was easy and ordinary and not about any of the things that mattered most. Nobody made me feel strange.
Nobody treated me like a ghost, or a victim, or a problem to be managed.
They just folded me into the morning like I’d always been part of it, like the chair I’d sat in for weeks had always had my name on it.
Maybe for them it was that easy. Maybe when you’d spent more than a decade grieving someone, having them back, alive and chopping your onions, was simple in a way that overrode everything else.
Madden showed up next.
She let herself in the way the rest of them did, calling out that Rios had gone to the station, shedding her coat by the door. And the moment I saw her, I knew there was something I needed to do.
Because I wasn’t sure I’d handled her right last night.
Not that there was a manual for it. Not that anyone had ever written a guide for how to tell your cousin you weren’t actually dead after she’d given years of her life to your missing persons case.
I’d dropped the truth on all of them at once because that had been the only way I could do it.
But Madden was blood, and blood deserved more than a group reveal and a contact case.
“Can I talk to you?” I tipped my head toward the dining room.
She nodded and followed.
We stepped inside, and of course her gaze went straight to the target. The plywood with its spray-painted rings and the cleared floor. One brow winged up.
“Are we training for something?”
Smooth as water, I drew one of the knives from the sheath at my thigh and threw it. It buried itself in the center of the target with a solid thunk. “Always. It helps settle me.”
Madden looked at the knife quivering in the wood. Then she closed her eyes. “I can’t even imagine—”
“Don’t.” I reached out and laid a hand on her arm. “Seriously. Don’t go there. It’s not productive, and it doesn’t help either of us. I survived. That’s the piece that matters. That’s the only piece that matters.”
She didn’t say anything. Her eyes stayed closed for a moment longer, and I watched her work to put something back in its box, the same way I’d watched her hold herself together last night, the family resemblance written all over the effort of it.
I dropped my hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. Any of you.”
“I understand why.” She opened her eyes. “Or I can surmise. WITSEC?”
“Yeah.”
“They wouldn’t even let you tell your parents?”
“At the time, they had no idea who was involved. Who could be trusted, how far it reached.” I shook my head.
“It killed me not to tell them. That they still don’t know.
But right or wrong, it wasn’t my call to make.
By the time I had any say in it, I’d already lost them.
There was no way to undo it without putting everyone at risk. ”
She nodded slowly, taking it in, processing it the way she processed everything, her prosecutor’s mind turning it over, looking at it from the angles, filing each piece where it belonged. Then she said, “I need to ask you something.”
“I’ll answer if I can.”
“When did you know it was me who reached out to Devon?”
“Almost as soon as you put in the case request.” I watched that detail land.
“Does he know who you are?”
“No. Nobody at Unaccounted does.” I held her gaze because this part mattered, and I needed her to hear it.
“And to be clear, I didn’t have any idea you and Devon were friends until your request came through.
But once it did, he needed to send someone, and I made sure that someone was me.
Because it was you asking. Because you never gave up on me.
” My throat tightened around the words. “That mattered, Madden. Even when I didn’t know it was happening, it mattered. You mattered.”
That was what did it.
Madden’s composure, the careful, contained thing she wore the way I wore mine, finally cracked clean through.
She crossed the space between us and pulled me in, and this wasn’t last night’s stunned, disbelieving embrace.
This was the tight, fierce hug of family.
The hug of someone who’d been holding a grief shaped exactly like me for all these years and was only now, finally, allowed to set it down.
“I can’t believe you’re really here,” she said against my shoulder. “After all this time.”
I held on just as tight. “Me neither.” And then, because it was true, because it was the thing I’d come back to this island carrying and the thing I intended to see through: “And we’re going to make all those years count.
We’re going to find the evidence, and we’re going to take these fuckers down. All of them.”
“Damned straight.” She pulled back and wiped at her face with the heel of her hand, and something in her had settled that hadn’t been settled before. The cousin and the prosecutor, both of them, lining up behind the same purpose.
Then she let out a breath and looked toward the kitchen. “But I really need more coffee first.”