Page 18 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"This is why they killed him."

"Yes."

"You knew." My voice is shaking now, and I can't tell if it's grief or rage or both tangled together so tight I can't separate them. "You talked to my father. He trusted you. He told you he was scared and you told him you'd handle it."

"I did promise him that."

"And then you let me think you were just some agent handling a case." The words come out sharp, accusatory. "You never told me he called you. You never told me he was terrified. You never told me any of it. You just let me believe you were doing your job."

"I was going to. I wanted you to be ready to hear it."

"Ready?" My voice cracks upward, too loud for the quiet kitchen. "You've had me here for a week."

"I promised him," Hudson says. "The night of the crash, I had an extraction arranged. Your whole family. I told him I'd get all four of you out safely."

"What happened?"

"Someone leaked the route. I don't know who yet. But I know it came from inside my own team."

The room goes very quiet, and something else is surfacing underneath the horror—a memory I've never let myself look at directly. Blood. Sirens. Someone's arms, solid and sure, lifting me like I weighed nothing at all.

"You were there," I whisper. "That night."

Hudson doesn't move. Doesn't defend himself. Just stands there and lets me say it.

"You were the one who found me."

"Yes." His voice comes out rough, stripped down to something raw I haven't heard from him before. "I was the one who pulled you out of the car. I carried you up that embankment myself."

I can't breathe. I can't process the image of his hands on me that night, his arms carrying me, his voice the first thing I heard when I was terrified and alone. All this time, and he never said a word.

"You let me think you were protecting me from a stranger," I whisper. "But you were protecting me from yourself. From your guilt. From the fact that you promised my father you'd save us all and you couldn't."

"You were supposed to save them," I say, "and you didn't."

"No," he says. "I didn't."

I press my hand against my mouth, because if I don't, I'm going to make a sound I won't be able to take back. My father's voice comes back to me suddenly, clear as if he were standing in the room—some things are worth saving—and I understand now, with a horror that goes all the way to the bone, exactly what he meant.

He knew. He knew he might not make it, and he hid the truth inside the one thing he was sure I'd never let go of.

I don't say anything else. I can't. I turn away from him and walk toward the stairs, my legs unsteady beneath me, and I don't look back to see if he follows.

He doesn't.

I lie on top of the covers for a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle around me. I hear him moving downstairs eventually—quiet, careful sounds, like he's trying not to disturb something fragile. A drawer. The click of the lockbox. The low murmur of his voice on the phone, too far away to make out words.

I think he's giving me space on purpose. I think he believes that after tonight, I might not want him anywhere near me, and so he's making himself small and distant and separate, folding himself into the far end of the house like he doesn't have the right to be close.

The thought knots my stomach.

I close my eyes and try to sleep, and instead I go back there. Not the crash itself—I don't remember the crash, not really, just noise and then nothing—but after. The part I've never let myself examine too closely. The cold. The smell of gasoline and pine needles. A voice saying my name, over and over, low and urgent, like an anchor thrown into deep water. Arms sliding under me. Not rough. Not clinical. Careful, like I was something that might shatter if he moved wrong.

I remember thinking, in whatever fractured way a person thinks with a concussion and a shattered rib and a family dying around her: someone's here. Someone's got me.

I never had a face to put with it. I never had anything but the arms and the voice and the terrible, bottomless relief of not being alone in the wreckage anymore.

I know now they were his.