Page 24 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"And to the leak in my team." Hudson looks back at me. "If Voss disappears, Michaelson disappears with him. Everything your father died for walks out of the country in the next forty-eight hours."

I think about my father staying late at the office. Copying files with shaking hands. Calling a stranger because he wanted to do the right thing. I think about his voice in the recipe book's margins, his handwriting in the corners of my mother's pages.

"Go," I say.

"Dash and Finn are twenty minutes out. Madelyn's with them."

"I'll be fine." I mean it. Somehow, standing in the dark with a gun I just used and a man I just put down, I mean it completely. "Go get him."

Hudson pulls me in hard and fast, both arms locked around me, his mouth against my hair. It lasts three seconds. It feels like everything.

Then he's gone, moving into the dark woods at a speed that makes clear he was built for exactly this.

I lower myself to sit against the pine tree with my back to the bark and the gun across my knees and wait for the sound of Dash's truck on the gravel road.

I stop hiding the scars.

I stop pretending this is temporary.

And now the man I fell for has disappeared into the dark after the last ghost of the nightmare that took my family, and I am not the girl I was seven months ago—the one who could only wait inside a wrecked car for someone to come and find her.

I press my forehead to my knees and breathe.

He's going to come back.

And so am I.

ten

. . .

Rhys

I hate leaving her under that pine tree with Dash still twenty minutes away.

I hate it with a visceral, bone-deep certainty that makes every instinct scream to turn around and go back. She's sitting with her back to the bark, the gun across her knees, her eyes tracking me until the darkness swallows the sight of her. She's steady. She's capable. She just killed a man to survive.

And I'm still leaving her alone in the dark.

But Voss has a lead, and every minute I stand here is another minute he gets closer to Michaelson, and if Michaelson disappears tonight, Daniel Thompson died for nothing.

I can't let Daniel die for nothing.

I've owed him that much for seven months.

I'm two miles into the tree line when my phone vibrates against my ribs. Dash's voice comes through tight and controlled.

"I've got her."

The relief that floods through me is so sharp it's almost painful. I breathe for the first time since I left her standing in the clearing.

"She's settled?" I ask, still moving northeast through the darkness.

"Wrapped in a blanket on the porch. Madelyn's got her. Finn's on the perimeter."

"Good." I scan the darkness downslope, measuring distance. "Stay close."

I end the call and refocus on the hunt.