Page 25 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

Voss is good, but he's rattled. Rattled men make mistakes.

The first one is the snapped pine bough thirty yards into the tree line—chest height, broken in the direction of the ridge. A man moving with confidence and purpose doesn't leave that kind of damage. A man who watched three of his team not come out of a cabin they were supposed to walk through clean, who is doing the math on what it means that the girl is still breathing and the federal agent is still standing, that man is moving fast and stupid.

I follow the mistakes like a map.

He's angling northeast, which tells me he has a vehicle waiting on the logging road that cuts behind the ridge—the same road Dash uses to reach the cabin from the north, which means Rourke gave them the full property survey. Not just the address. The approach routes, the terrain layout, the secondary exits. Everything a security sweep would've pulled from my personal property records.

My jaw tightens and I keep moving.

At the ridge, where the tree cover finally breaks enough for a signal, I call Dash again.

"I need you on a clean channel. Not task force, not agency-routed. The encryption key from the Reno job."

A brief pause. "That bad?"

"Worse." I move downslope, following the broken branches like breadcrumbs. "Pull everything on Caleb Rourke. Access logs, property queries, financial records. Everything."

He takes thirty-two minutes, but what he sends me is clean and complete and damning enough to end a career and a freedom simultaneously.

Rourke accessed the Thompson extraction file six times in the seventy-two hours before the crash. All six accesses were authorized at the time, buried in normal operational traffic—the kind of routine work that wouldn't flag during an initial audit. But the later unauthorized queries change everything: the cabin property records three weeks ago, the witness-protection search two days before Michaelson's contract went active. Those are the threads that reveal the pattern in retrospect. He was making sure there was no official record of Willow before he handed her location to Voss.

Covering the tracks of a girl he'd already helped try to kill once.

I read the documentation on the move and feel something go very cold and very quiet inside me. Not rage—I've learned to be careful about rage, because rage makes noise and noise makes mistakes, and I cannot afford a single mistake tonight. What I feel instead is the specific, load-bearing kind of anger that has patience built into it. The kind that can carry weight for however long it takes.

I send three words back to Dash: Move on Rourke.

He sends back two: Already moving.

I find Voss at the base of the ridge.

He's made it to the logging road but his vehicle isn't there yet—delayed, probably, because his driver was one of the three men who didn't walk out of the cabin, and the backup pickup is running on a timeline that no longer accounts for everything going wrong simultaneously. He's standing at the road's edge with a burner phone, no signal, and the specific stillness of a man who is beginning to understand that his exit plan has a hole in it.

He hears me when I'm fifteen feet out. He's that good—better than most, better than anyone I've cornered in the last decade. He turns fast and he comes in hard, and what follows isn't clean or brief or the kind of thing that looks the way violence looks in movies. It's ugly and close and exhausting and it goes on longer than it should because he's been doing this kind of work for thirty years and he doesn't quit when he's hurt.

I don't quit either.

When it's over, I'm on one knee in the gravel and my ribs are screaming from where he caught me with his elbow twice in the same spot, and Nolan Voss is looking up at a sky he's not going to see much longer.

He knows it too.

"Rourke's already burned," I tell him, because I want him to know before he goes that the exit he thought was open is closed. "Every log, every access record, every piece of communication he touched. It's all going to people who aren't on Michaelson's payroll."

He doesn't answer right away. His breathing is labored. His hands are still.

"Route 9," I say. "Seven months ago. Walk me through it."

A long silence. Then, because he's a man who spent thirty years being precise about operational details and old habits don't die with the body, he talks.

Rourke gave him the route in three pieces over eighteen hours. Not the full plan at once—Rourke was smart enough to make it look like fragmented security traffic if anyone ever audited him, except he hadn't counted on Dash's eye for access-log patterns. Voss had a four-man team on Route 9 two hours before the pickup window, plenty of time to stage it. The Thompson family car was already being tracked from the house. It was clean. It was supposed to be clean. Nobody was supposed to get out.

"The girl," I say.

His jaw shifts. "She was alive in the wreck."

The words land in my chest like something physical. But hearing it from Voss is different. Hearing it from the man who stood at the bottom of that embankment and looked at a twenty-year-old girl trapped in a car with her dead family and made a calculation.

"You heard her," I say.