Chapter 46
Forty-Six
LAYLA
I’d pounced on Dax’s file the second Jace got out the door.
Gabi had given up on the financials and migrated to the kitchen to help Willa with something that involved a great deal of chopping.
The afternoon light had long since faded.
Madden had pulled her chair around next to mine, and we’d been working through it side by side for an hour, the two of us moving through the deeper Ashmore business structure—her with the prosecutor’s eye, me with professional understanding how money like this moved and hid and laundered itself clean.
John Hollingsworth’s name was all over it.
Neither of us said anything about that for a while.
We just kept seeing it—on funding documents, on the formation paperwork for ventures that traced back to Ashmore capital, on the Teller projects specifically.
Madden knew where Jace had gone. Or at least suspected.
I’d seen her watch him leave and seen her decline to ask, the same way she’d declined to push when he wouldn’t name his lead.
She was a smart woman. She’d done the math.
“Here,” she said quietly, and turned her laptop toward me.
I looked.
It was a series of entity records, the kind of dry administrative filings that meant nothing until you laid them in sequence, and the sequence told a story.
John Hollingsworth had been a managing member, a signatory, a name on the documents of several of these ventures.
And over the last few weeks he’d been coming off them.
Resignations of position. Transfers of interest. His name being unwound from the structure, methodically, one entity at a time.
“He’s being removed,” Madden said. “Cleanly. Look at the dates. This isn’t him divesting on his own timeline. It’s coordinated. Somebody’s scrubbing him out of the architecture.”
I looked at the dates. She was right. There was nothing organic about it. It was the careful, sequential work of someone sanitizing a structure, the same way you’d wipe down a surface you intended to walk away from.
“Why would they unwind him?” I was thinking out loud, the way I did when the pieces were close but not touching. “If he’s an asset—if he’s the respectable money that makes the rest of it look legitimate—why pull him out?”
“Could be a lot of things.” Madden pulled her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “He could be retiring. Winding down his own holdings, getting his affairs in order, nothing sinister. People restructure.”
“Could be.”
“Could be he’s distancing himself on purpose. If he got nervous, if he started to suspect what the money actually was, getting his name off the paper is exactly what a careful man would do.”
“Could be that too.” I heard how flat my own voice had gone.
“Or,” Madden said, and stopped, because she’d arrived at the same place I had and didn’t want to say it any more than I did.
I said it. “Or he’s a loose end.”
The dining room was quiet. From the kitchen came the sound of Gabi laughing at something, Willa’s voice answering, the ordinary domestic noise of people who didn’t yet have any idea what we were looking at.
“They clean up exposure,” I said. “We’ve watched them do it.
Carson. Miles. Diane Crowell run off the road after she talked to us.
This is what they do. When someone becomes a liability, they remove them.
” I touched the screen, the cluster of recent dates.
“You don’t unwind a man like this and let him walk away knowing what he knows.
You unwind him so that, when he’s gone, there’s nothing tying him to anything. The clean paper is the prep.”
Madden stilled. “Then why invite him to the party?”
That was the thing that didn’t fit. I turned it over. “Tell me the innocent version.”
“Old friends.” She said it the way you offer up a hypothesis you don’t believe but are obligated to test. “Edmund and John go back years. You can be winding down a business relationship and still want a man at your New Year’s party.
People compartmentalize. Or it’s exactly what it looked like—a social event, nothing operational, and we’re seeing sinister patterns because we’re primed to see them. ”
“That’s the innocent version.”
“That’s the innocent version.” She looked at me. “You don’t buy it.”
I tried to, because the innocent version meant Jace was sitting in a restaurant having an ordinary, unsatisfying dinner with his father, and the other version meant something I didn’t want to consider.
But I’d learned to trust the read my gut handed me, because the times I’d ignored it were the times it had cost me, and my gut was telling me that you didn’t sanitize a man out of your structure and then bring him close.
Unless bringing him close was part of how you finished it.
I pulled out my phone.
I texted Jace something that would mean everything to him and nothing to anyone who picked up his phone and read it.
Layla:
Thinking about you. Tell me when you’re heading home. Koa misses you.
Ordinary. The kind of text a woman sent a man she was sleeping with. But he’d know I didn’t send check-in texts, that Koa was a code we’d never agreed on but that he’d understand as me reaching for him, that Tell me when meant Tell me you’re okay.
I watched the screen. No dots. No reply.
I told myself that was nothing. He was at dinner. He’d silenced his phone, the way you do at a meal, the way I’d watched him do dozens of times. He’d said he’d call when he was finished.
I called him anyway.
Straight to voicemail. Not even a ring. The phone was off or silenced or face-down on a white tablecloth somewhere, and any of those was completely ordinary, and none of it should have meant anything.
It meant something. The cold, certain weight of it settled in my chest, the same weight that had kept me alive more than once by refusing to be reasoned away.
I set the phone down and made myself breathe and ran the calculation the way I’d run a thousand calculations.
I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to stay in the house.
Sutter House was the defensible position.
That was the whole point of me being here instead of the cottage, and leaving it alone was the single thing every protocol we’d set existed to prevent.
I knew that. I knew it the way I knew my own name—both of my names.
If one of my self-defense students had come to me with this exact situation—a bad feeling, an unanswered phone, a partner at a dinner that was probably fine—I’d have told them to sit down, breathe, wait twenty minutes, and call again before they did anything stupid.
I knew all of it.
And I knew that if I was wrong about going, the cost was my own exposure, my own risk, a thing I’d spent years learning to manage. And if I was wrong about staying, the cost was Jace. Dead at a table next to his father, because I’d done the smart thing and sat in a safe house while my gut screamed.
I wasn’t willing to pay that price. I examined it, turned it over, looked for the flaw in it, and found only that I’d stopped being able to be objective about Jace Hollingsworth somewhere around the storm, and that this was exactly the compromise in judgment I’d spent my whole adult life refusing to allow.
I was going to allow it anyway. For him. Because it was him.
I wasn’t going to take any of these women with me. Whatever this was, I’d brought it to their door. I wasn’t adding them to the ledger.
I stood and stretched like my back was stiff from the chair. “I’m going to take Koa out before he bursts. Back in a few.”
Madden glanced up. “It’s dark. Take—”
“Just to the yard.” I was already moving, Koa rising from his spot by the table and falling in at my knee, reading the shift in me the way he read everything, alert now, ears working. “Two minutes.”
I didn’t go to the yard.
The Bronco was parked at the side of the house where Sawyer had left it after retrieving it from the cottage along with the rest of my things.
Koa jumped into the back without being told twice, and I got behind the wheel with the knives at my thighs and my heart going hard and steady.
I told myself the whole time that I was overreacting.
That I’d get to town and find Jace pushing back from a half-eaten dinner, and I’d feel like a fool, and we’d laugh about it later.
After Jace finished reaming me out for being an idiot.
That this was the anxiety talking, the fear of finally having something to lose.
I cranked the engine and pulled out of the drive.
I was on the coast road, the village lights still a few minutes ahead, when my phone started ringing in the cup holder.
Madden’s name, then a second call stacking behind it, and I understood they’d realized I was gone.
I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t turn into them trying to stop me, and I was already committed, already past the point where stopping made sense.
The road up here was dark and empty, maritime forest crowding the shoulder to one side, the marsh giving way to the beach on the other, no streetlights this far from the village. My headlights cut a narrow channel through it. Koa shifted in the back, restless, picking up on my rising tension.
I almost didn’t see it.
Something across the road, low and dark against the asphalt, and my brain registered it a half second too late—a line, a glint, a thing that didn’t belong on the road surface—and then both front tires let go at once with a sound like a shotgun, and the wheel wrenched in my hands.
Training took over. I didn’t brake hard. Braking hard was how you rolled. I came off the gas and fought the wheel and tried to ride it down, but I was going too fast and the shoulder came up too quick. The Bronco’s front end caught the soft sand at the edge, dug in, and the world turned sideways.
The impact came from everywhere. The seatbelt cut across my chest. Glass.
The crunch and shriek of metal finding something it couldn’t move through.
Koa was thrown against the back of my seat with a heavy sound that I felt more than heard, and then the Bronco rocked hard and slammed to a stop at an angle, nose-down in the marsh, the engine ticking, one headlight still burning.
I was reeling. Couldn’t get a full breath. Something hot ran down the side of my face.
Koa.
He was moving in the back, scrambling, and then he was up and snarling—a sound I’d rarely heard from him, the full-throated rage of a hundred pounds of malamute who understood his person was in danger—barking, throwing himself toward the broken-out window.
I reached for him, calling his name and trying to get my hand on the seatbelt buckle all at once.
A shape moved in the dark beyond the glass.
Koa’s snarl climbed and then broke into a high, sharp yelp, and his body dropped, and I screamed something—his name or a command or merely rage—my hand already going to the knife at my thigh because they’d hurt my dog and the cold thing in me that had kept me alive at fifteen came roaring up out of the dark where I kept it.
The door wrenched open. Metal screaming against metal.
A hand closed on my arm and pulled.
I didn’t fight the momentum, instead using the pull and driving the knife up and out toward the shape that was hauling me into the night. The blade landed. Bit into something that gave. A man’s voice ripped out a curse in the dark, and the grip on me faltered.
I didn’t stop. I couldn’t see, my head was wrong, the ground wasn’t where it should be, but I struck again, kept the knife moving, hit whatever I could reach because stopping meant the cage, and I would die before I went back to the cage.
The prick of the needle came at the side of my neck.
Small. Almost nothing. A bee sting in the dark.
I kept fighting. I told my hand to hold the knife, and my hand stopped listening.
I told my legs to drive, and my legs softened like noodles.
The knife slipped out of fingers that had stopped being mine.
It hit the road with a metallic clang, and the dark that had been all around me started coming from the inside too, rising up to meet the night.
Koa, I thought. I have to get to Koa.
Jace.
And then I didn’t think anything at all.