Chapter 47
Forty-Seven
JACE
After an hour and a half of my father rambling at length and with his usual charm, circling his subjects without ever quite landing on them, I had nothing.
I’d fished the whole meal, working the angles under the cover of a son finally showing interest, and what I’d pulled up was exactly the picture Dax had sketched and nothing more.
John knew Edmund Ashmore. John had funded ventures connected to Edmund Ashmore.
John was certainly acquainted with Marcus Teller, had put money into Teller’s projects, and considered him a sound investment.
And when I’d steered close to the questions that mattered—where does the money come from, what’s underneath it—my father had given me the truest thing he’d said all night, with no idea he was giving me anything at all.
“I don’t ask.” He said it easily, a man explaining something self-evident to a slow student.
“That’s not my job. My job is to recognize a good return when I see one.
A man comes to me with capital that wants to grow, I help it grow.
Where he got it, what he does otherwise, is his business.
I’ve found that the people who insist on knowing everything tend not to last long in this line of work.
” He’d smiled, pleased with his own wisdom.
“Discretion is the whole game, Jace. Knowing what not to look at.”
Knowing what not to look at.
There it was. Not innocent. Not guilty. A man who had built an entire life out of the disciplined refusal to see anything that would inconvenience him, who had taken money from people he had to have suspected and put it to work.
And then slept just fine, because not-knowing was a skill he’d honed to a fine professional edge.
The same not-looking that had let him sign the papers committing his own daughter and never once examine what he’d done.
It was all the same muscle. He’d just spent his whole life exercising it.
I couldn’t prove he knew. I was nearly certain he didn’t, in the way that mattered legally—that he’d kept himself deliberately ignorant precisely so that this conversation, if it ever happened, could go exactly the way it was going.
And the part of me that had come here braced to find my father at the center of it sat with the strange, hollow non-relief of having found something worse and smaller instead.
There was no catharsis in it. He wasn’t a monster I could hate cleanly.
He was just a man who’d decided long ago that other people’s suffering was a thing you didn’t look directly at if looking would cost you, and he’d been right that it never had.
What I couldn’t tell was whether the not-looking was the whole of it.
Whether my father was exactly what he appeared to be—a man who took dirty money and kept his eyes politely averted—or whether there was something underneath that he was performing his way around even now, with me, over the wine.
I’d come braced to read the truth off him in person, and the truth I’d read was maddeningly partial.
He was in it. He wasn’t at the center of it.
Past that I had nothing solid, and I was out of time to dig, because the check had come and my father was reaching for it with the flourish of a man who enjoyed paying.
“Let me,” he said. “Least I can do, for getting you out on my last night.”
I let him. It cost me nothing, and it kept him pleased, and pleased was how I wanted him when I walked out, so he’d have no reason to think the dinner had been anything but what he believed it was. A son coming back around.
“I’m glad you came, Jace.” He stood, settled his jacket. “Think about what I said. The coast. There’s a place for you in it, if you want one. You don’t owe the Navy your whole life.”
“I’ll think about it.”
We did the not-quite-handshake at the door.
He held my hand a beat too long, the way he’d held Layla’s, the way he held everything he wanted to keep.
Then he went toward the car waiting to take him to wherever he was staying his last night, and I went toward my truck, and that was the last I’d think about my father for a long while.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket as I crossed the lot.
I’d kept it silenced through the meal out of the same instinct that had kept my father comfortable. No interruptions, full attention, the performance of a man with nowhere else to be. Now the screen lit up with the backlog.
Missed calls. Layla, twice. A text from Layla. Then Madden, three times. Willa, twice. The calls stacked tight together in the last forty minutes, a cluster of them, the pattern of people trying to reach someone and not getting through.
The cold crawled up my spine before I’d consciously read any of it.
Layla’s text first.
Layla:
Thinking about you. Tell me when you’re heading home. Koa misses you.
Wrong. Every word of it was wrong. She didn’t send texts like that.
Koa misses you. Koa was the tell, the thing that meant she was reaching for me, that something was off, that she needed confirmation I was okay.
She’d sent it, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant with my phone in my jacket, letting my father pay for dinner.
I started to call her back. My thumb was on her name when the phone buzzed in my hand. Willa, calling again.
I answered it, already moving faster toward the truck. “Willa.”
“Jace, oh God, where are you?” Her voice was high and fast, the panic in it stripping the bottom out of my stomach.
“Layla’s gone. She said she was taking Koa to the yard, and then we heard the Bronco, and by the time we got outside she was already down the drive and she’s not answering.
We’ve been calling. None of us can reach her. ”
“When?” I wrenched the truck door open. “Willa. How long ago?”
“Fifteen minutes? Twenty? We didn’t realize at first. We were heads down in the records and she just… Jace, she found something in those files, she and Madden both, and she got this look and wouldn’t say what and now she’s not answering.”
“I’m on my way.” I had the engine cranked, the truck already moving before I’d fully closed the door. “Call Rios. Now. Tell him Layla’s missing, tell him I’m on it. Stay in the house. Lock it. Do not come looking. You understand me?”
“Jace—”
“Lock the house, Willa.” I hung up.
The coast road was the only way she’d have come.
There was one route between Sutter House and the village, the dark stretch where the forest ran down one side and the dunes and ocean fell away on the other, no lights and no houses, and I took it at a speed that road was never built for, my headlights tearing through the dark, every cell in me gone cold and clear and operational because operational was the only thing keeping the other thing down.
I found it four miles out of the village.
The Bronco was nose-down off the right shoulder where the dunes fell away, canted hard in the soft sand, one headlight still burning out across the dark slope toward the water.
I had my truck stopped and angled to light the scene before I’d finished registering the rest of it, and I was out with my weapon drawn and clearing the angles before my brain caught up to what my eyes were taking in.
No one. Whoever had done this was gone, and had been gone long enough that the dust had settled and the road was silent except for the tick of the Bronco’s cooling engine.
Across the asphalt, low and dark, a line glinted in my headlights.
I recognized what it was before I got to it.
A spike strip, the professional kind, laid across the road where the dark was thickest and a driver would have no time to react.
Deployed and left. They hadn’t even bothered to retrieve it.
Koa was on the ground beside the Bronco.
Fuck. Oh, fuck no.
I darted forward, pressing my hand to his side and felt it rise and fall, slow and heavy, and found the small bare patch where the dart had gone in.
Tranqed, not dead. Coming up out of it slowly, his eyes half-open and unfocused, a low, confused sound coming out of him as he tried to make his legs work and couldn’t.
He knew. Even mostly under, he knew she was gone, and he was trying to get up and go after her, and his body wouldn’t let him.
“Easy,” I told him, my voice not entirely steady. “Easy. I’ve got it.”
The driver’s door had been pried open. The metal was bent where something had wrenched it past its hinge, and the seatbelt hung cut and empty.
And on the road, a few feet from the open door, lay a knife.
I crouched over it. One of hers. I recognized the make, the balance of it, had watched her bury its twin in plywood this morning, a hundred years ago.
The blade was wet. Dark and wet along its length, and more of it pooled small on the asphalt beneath, and it wasn’t hers, because she’d been belted in and the blood was out here where she’d been dragged.
She’d gotten a piece of one of them. She’d fought.
Of course she’d fought. She’d have fought with everything her life had built into her, and it was all right here on the road in front of me: the cut seatbelt and the pried door, and the bloody knife she’d dropped.
It hadn’t been enough. All of it, every hour of training, every knife and every form and every reflex she’d hammered into herself so that no one would ever take her again, and the right people with the right plan had taken her anyway, off a dark road, in the time it took me to let my father pay for dinner.
The thing I’d been holding down tried to come up. The full size of it, the panic, the image of her in the dark in their hands, the place every part of me wanted to go.
I put it away.
I crouched on a dark road over her dog and her bloody knife, and I put the panic in the box where it belonged, because panic didn’t get her back and the cold, clear, operational thing did. I was going to need every piece of that now.
I pulled my phone out. Called Sawyer first.
He answered on the second ring. “Jace—”
“Shut the ferry down. Right now, tonight, every run. Nothing leaves Hatterwick. Not a boat off our docks, not a charter, nothing you can reach. Layla’s been taken, and I need this island sealed.”
The noise behind him cut out, a door closing. “Taken.” Not a question. Sawyer didn’t waste time on disbelief. “I can stop our boats inside five minutes, and I’ll lean on the marina to hold private craft. Coast Guard’s the gap. I can’t ground a plane.”
“Get Daniel on the Coast Guard. He can push it faster than anyone.” I was already moving back toward Koa. “Then get to Sutter House. Come ready.”
“On it.” He was gone.
I called Rios next.
“Willa reached me, I’m rolling toward Sutter House,” he said. “Talk.”
“Coast road, four miles north of the village. Spike strip across the road, her Bronco’s wrecked in the dunes.
Koa’s darted but alive. Driver’s door pried open, seatbelt cut.
” Flat and fast, report cadence, facts only.
“There’s blood on the scene that isn’t hers.
She fought, she got one of them, they took her anyway.
Gone twenty, twenty-five minutes. Sawyer’s shutting the ferry down and putting Daniel on the Coast Guard. ”
A beat of silence. “Halston.”
“Halston.” I had no doubt. He’d recognized her at the party.
He’d been patient. He’d waited for her to be alone, and tonight she’d handed him the opening.
“Sutter House, twenty minutes. Bring everything you can put your hands on. We’re not waiting on the SBI, and we’re not waiting on warrants. I know where she is.”
“You don’t know that yet.”
“I know it.” I crouched and got my arms under Koa, a hundred pounds of half-conscious dog, and lifted him toward the truck because I wasn’t leaving him on the side of the road. I wouldn’t leave her knife either. “I’ve known where this ends since the party. Twenty minutes.”
I hung up.
I got Koa into the cab, laid him across the back seat. He made a sound and got one paw under himself and gave up, his eyes finding me, confused and stricken and trying to tell me something I already knew.
“I’m going to get her,” I told him. I yanked the spike strip off the road and retrieved her knife, the blade still wet. I held it for a second in the wash of my headlights. “I’m going to get her back.”
Then I got in the truck and drove.