Page 20 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"How? We just found it. Nobody saw us⁠—"

"Doesn't matter how." He's already moving, already thinking three steps ahead. "What matters is that they're moving now. Which means we're moving now."

He looks at me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.

eight

. . .

Rhys

The message stays lit on my screen for three seconds too long before I move.

"Get your shoes," I tell Willow. "Now."

She doesn't argue, which tells me she understood the look on my face better than I wanted her to. I sweep the recipe book and the microdrive into a lockbox from the hall closet, grab my laptop and the go-bag I keep by the stairs, and walk her down to the secure room beneath the cabin—a poured-concrete space disguised as a root cellar, reinforced enough to survive anything short of a direct assault, stocked with enough supplies to outlast a siege. I built it two years ago for a different job, a different threat. I never imagined I'd be leading Willow Thompson down these stairs with her father's murder evidence in my hand.

"Stay here," I say, setting her up at the small desk with the laptop, a satellite radio, and a lamp. "I need to make some calls."

"Hudson." Her voice is steady, but her hands are not. "Talk to me. What did that message mean?"

"It means Michaelson has your location. I need to know how he got it." I crouch in front of her so we're eye level. "I'm not shutting you out. I need fifteen minutes to think without watching the door."

She nods, jaw tight, and lets me go.

Upstairs, I open a channel I haven't used since the Michaelson investigation went cold seven months ago—compartmented, routed through three relays, the kind of connection that doesn't show up on any log a compromised agent could pull. Dash answers on the second ring.

"Talk," he says.

"Voss is moving on us. Michaelson knows where I brought her. Somebody gave him this property."

A pause, then Dash's voice drops low. "That's not public information, Wolfe. That's restricted access."

"I know."

"You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I'm thinking about Route 9," I say, and my stomach turns over just saying it out loud. "I want the extraction file from seven months ago. Every access log, every person who touched that route before it got sold."

"On it. Give me twenty minutes."

Finn and Madelyn are on the line by the time Dash calls back, and I put everything on the screen where all three of them can see it—the original extraction plan for the Thompson family, timestamped, with four names attached to full route access. Myself. Dash. Finn. And Caleb Rourke.

"Pull the cabin's security profile," I say. "Compare access logs."

It takes Dash four minutes to find it. Three weeks ago, a query ran against the property records tied to my personal holdings—an internal search, flagged as routine, buried under a stack of similar administrative pulls that nobody would think twice about. The kind of search an actual auditor might run. Except I know for a fact nobody requested an audit of my personal property three weeks ago.

The login credentials belong to Caleb Rourke.

"Son of a bitch," Finn says quietly.

I sit there staring at the screen, and something in my chest goes cold and still in a way that's worse than rage. Caleb Rourke sat two desks down from me for ten years. He brought doughnuts on Fridays. He came to Finn's wedding. He was in the room the night we planned the Thompson extraction, nodding along, asking good questions, acting like a man who gave a damn whether a family of four made it out alive.

He didn't just sell an address seven months ago. He watched Daniel Thompson's face on a briefing screen, heard me describe a wife and two kids who needed protecting, and then made a phone call that got all three of them killed. And now he's done it again—queried my private property records, found the cabin, and handed Michaelson exactly what he needs to finish what Voss started on that embankment.

"Wolfe." Dash's voice cuts through whatever black hole I've fallen into. "You still with us?"

"I'm here." My own voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere far away. "I trusted him. Daniel trusted me, and I brought a rat right into the room where we planned to save his family."