Chapter 49
Forty-Nine
JACE
We went in light because light was what we had.
Kevlar vests, sidearms, tactical knives. It wasn’t much. But it was the four of us, and the four of us had never needed much.
The island was as locked down as we could manage.
Sawyer had killed the ferry inside ten minutes of my call, the marina was holding private craft, and Daniel had the Coast Guard watching the water.
Rios had put a BOLO on Halston Ashmore with instructions to detain on sight.
None of that was going to find him, and I knew it, because I knew exactly where he was.
He was here, in his glass house on the south end, because a man that arrogant didn’t run.
He’d waited years for her. He wasn’t going anywhere until he was finished.
We came up on Ashmore’s monument of glass and pale stone through the dark from the dune side, no lights, no sound.
From the party, I knew the layout of the grounds, the rooms now lit low and warm or dark.
I’d walked through here with a champagne glass in my hand and Layla on my arm, and that knowledge of the place was the one advantage we had. Now I was using it to get her back out.
We’d clocked two men on the approach. One on the ground floor moving through the lit rooms, one posted near the side entrance.
Hired muscle, not soldiers. Comfortable.
They weren’t expecting anyone, because the whole point of a spike strip on a dark road was that the people who’d notice she was gone wouldn’t know where to look.
They were wrong about that.
We took the posted man first. Ford and I came up on him from his blind side, and it was over before he understood he wasn’t alone.
Ford’s arm across his throat, my hand controlling the weapon hand, the two of us taking him down to the ground and holding him there until he stopped moving, then zip-cuffing him and leaving him secured and silent against the wall.
Clean. Fast. The kind of thing the four of us could do without a word passing between us, because we’d been reading each other our whole lives.
The second man was inside. We found him in a side hallway, and this one I recognized the instant the light caught the field dressing wrapped tight around his forearm, blood already soaking through it, the white of it stark against the dark fabric of his sleeve.
The man Layla had cut.
Something cold and satisfied moved through me at the sight of it.
She’d gotten a piece of him. Of course she had.
Bound and outnumbered and dragged out of a wreck, and she’d still opened this man up to the bone before they put her under.
Whatever they’d done to take her, she’d made them bleed for it.
He reached for his weapon when he saw us.
He was a half second slow, the wounded arm not cooperating, and Rios closed the distance and put him on the floor with brutal efficiency.
Sawyer was there to help hold him, and then he was cuffed and down and out of it with tape over his mouth, and we hadn’t fired a shot or made a sound that would carry.
I oriented off my memory of the party. The main rooms ran along the ocean side, all that glass, the spaces meant to be seen and to show off the view.
But Halston wouldn’t keep her there, behind windows where anyone might see.
He’d want somewhere interior. Contained.
I ran the layout in my head—the great room, the kitchen, the gallery hall—and landed on the one space I remembered with only a narrow slot of a window, an interior room toward the back, the kind of room a man chose when he didn’t want what was happening inside it to be visible from the dark.
I signaled. Sawyer and Ford peeled off to cover the exits, the front and the side, so that whatever happened, no one left this house. Rios and I circled toward the back.
The door was ajar. Light spilling out of it, warm and low.
And through the gap I saw Layla bound to a chair by a fuckton of ties placed by someone who’d thought hard about not giving her room.
Blood streaked down from her temple, dried dark, and bruising already mottled one cheekbone.
Her head was up. Her eyes were open. She was conscious, and she was alive, and the single largest thing I’d been carrying since I found her Bronco in the dunes released its grip on my chest all at once, so completely that for a half second I had to lock my knees against it.
Alive. She was alive.
I put the relief away the same way I’d locked up the panic on the dark road, in the box where it belonged, because relief got her killed just as dead as panic if I let it slow me down.
She was alive and still in that chair, and Halston Ashmore was standing over her with a knife. The job wasn’t done.
Rios read my signal and nodded. We had no clean shot.
Halston stood too close to her, the angle wrong.
A round that missed by an inch would kill her instead.
So we played it the only way it could be played.
Rios entered first, sidearm up and trained center mass, and I held back of the doorway, out of the sightline, waiting for my opening.
Layla saw Rios the instant he cleared the threshold. She couldn’t lock down the flicker of recognition that crossed her face, and Halston caught it.
He moved fast. The knife came off the table and around to her throat, edge against her skin, and he hauled in tight behind the chair, putting her body between himself and the door before Rios had said a word.
The whole thing took less than a second.
A man who’d been waiting for someone to come and had already decided what he’d do when they did.
“That’s far enough.” His rebuilt face had gone ugly. “Weapon down, Chief, or I open her up right here.”
Rios didn’t lower the gun. He kept it level and kept his voice easy, the low, calm register he used to talk men off ledges. “Halston Ashmore. It’s over. The island’s locked down. Your men are in custody. There’s nowhere left for you to go, so let’s everybody slow down and think about this.”
“Slow down.” Halston laughed, high and wrong. “You have no idea what you’ve walked into. Do you know who my father is? Do you have the first idea what protects this? You touch me and it comes down on all of you, everyone you love—”
I was already moving.
I wasn’t listening to the words. I was watching the knife, and the angle, and the way he held her, and I was doing the cold, clear math that I’d been trained to do.
There was no version of this where Halston Ashmore let her live.
I knew it the way I knew the layout of the house.
A man like this didn’t get a thing he’d wanted this long and let it walk away.
If he couldn’t keep her, no one would have her.
The knife at her throat wasn’t leverage.
It was intent, looking for the moment to become action.
The second he understood there was no deal to be made, no way out that ended with him keeping her, he was going to open her throat out of pure spite, and there was no negotiation Rios could run fast enough to stop it.
And even if by some miracle he surrendered—even if he set the knife down and let himself be taken—he was Edmund Ashmore’s son, with the resources of that empire behind him and a head full of everything about his father’s dealings and his own.
He’d lawyer up. He’d deal. He’d trade his knowledge of the operation up the chain to people who’d want exactly that, and he’d walk, or he’d serve a fraction of a sentence somewhere comfortable, and he’d never stop being a thing that existed in the world, somewhere, that could come for her again.
I’d already accepted what that meant. Somewhere on the drive south I’d accepted it without ever saying it to myself. There would be consequences. I’d face them. They were worth it.
While he was still talking, still spitting his father’s name like a shield, I moved.
He’d put all his attention on Rios, the visible threat, the man with the badge in front of him.
He’d forgotten to keep track of me, because in his version of the world he was always the most dangerous man in the room, and that arrogance was the wire in the crate.
I came around the side, fast and silent, inside his guard before the words had finished leaving his mouth, and I got my hands where they needed to be—one at the back of his skull, one along the jaw—and I broke his neck the way I’d been trained to break it, one sharp decisive movement.
He dropped. The knife fell away from her throat as he crumpled, and he was dead before he hit the floor, and the room was suddenly, enormously quiet.
I stepped over his body without looking and crouched in front of her.
“I’ve got you.” I had my own knife out, working the zip ties, wrist and forearm and ankle, fast and careful, my hands steadier than they had any right to be. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. It’s done.”
The ties came away, and she came up out of the chair and into me, and I caught her. She shook and babbled, the words tumbling out half-formed.
“I’m sorry. Jace, I’m sorry, I left, I shouldn’t have left, I thought you were—I found the thing about your father, and I thought you were in danger, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t sit there, I had to—”
“Hey. Hey.” I had one hand at the back of her head, holding her against me, the other arm wrapped around her, and I felt how hard she shook now that it was over, the adrenaline and the drug and half a lifetime of nightmare all coming apart at once. “Stop. You don’t have to. None of that matters.”
“It does, I put you in—”
“You’re safe.” I pressed it into her hair. “That’s the only thing. You’re safe, I’m here, he’s gone. He’s gone, Layla. He’s never touching you again.”
She stopped trying to explain. She just held on, her face against my chest, and I held her, and for a moment the room and the body on the floor and everything still ahead of us fell away, and there was only the fact of her, alive, breathing, in my arms.
Over her head, I looked at Rios.
He was holstering his weapon, his eyes moving from Halston’s body to me and back, and I watched him make the decision, watched the chief of police and the brother arrive at the same place.
“Her life was imperiled,” Rios said. His voice was even and clear, the voice of a man stating a fact for the record. “He had a knife to her throat, and he was going to use it. None of us had a clean shot.” A beat. “You did what needed doing.”
That was the story. I saw it settle into him as he said it, saw him commit to it, and I understood without asking that it was the story all four of us would tell, identically, for the rest of our lives. Bless them. Bless every one of them.
Layla’s hand clamped suddenly on my arm, her head coming up. “Koa. They shot Koa—”
“A dart. Just a dart.” I caught her face in my hand, made her look at me. “He’s okay. He’s coming out of it. He’s back at Sutter House. Willa’s got him. He’s okay.”
The relief that poured through her was so total it nearly took her legs, and I held her up through it.
Then she straightened again, her hands tightening on me, and I watched something shift in her. The investigator surfaced through the survivor, the mind that never fully stopped working even now.
“Halston confessed,” she said. “All of it. He’s behind the trafficking.
Piggybacked on the drug running, exactly like Daniel thought.
It was his father’s operation first— the drugs, the routes, all of it— and Halston built the trafficking on top of it.
Edging out whoever was running a smaller ring before.
He’s taking the whole thing over now that Edmund’s stepping back.
There were others. Before me and after. But I was the first of Halston’s.
” Her voice was steady now, urgent, the words coming clearly.
“There might be records here. Contacts. Something.”
“We’ll get your statement,” Rios said. “And we’ll take this house apart board by board.”
“You need to call the FBI.” She looked at him, intent. “Not local, not the SBI. You said yourself that you don’t know how far the corruption goes. Ask for Special Agent Ned Cushley. He handled my original case. He’s clean. He’s safe. Start with him.”
“Cushley,” Rios repeated, fixing it. “I’ll see it done. Tonight.”
“In the meantime.” I tightened my arm around her, taking some of her weight, because now that the urgency was draining out of her, I felt how unsteady she really was. “We’re getting you checked out. Gabi will meet us at the clinic.”
“I’m fine—”
“You’ve got a head wound, and you’ve been drugged, and you’re shaking so hard you can barely stand.” I pressed my lips gently to her temple, to the dried blood there. “Let me take care of you. Just this once. Let me.”
She looked up at me, hazel eyes clear now, no contacts, nothing hidden, just her. And after a moment, she nodded.
I got her out of that room and away from the body on the floor. Out through the glass house where Sawyer and Ford were holding the exits, and into the night, and I didn’t let go of her the whole way.