Page 27 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"She's not a lead," I say again. "She's Willow. She's Daniel Thompson's daughter. She lost her entire family in one night because her father tried to do something decent, and she has spent seven months living under a borrowed name in a city that isn't hers, working in a bakery, baking bread before sunrise every morning because it's the only thing that makes the noise in her head quiet. She's twenty years old and she is the bravest person I've ever met, and she has a name."

Michaelson regards me for a long moment. The calibrated calm shifts—not into panic, not into remorse, but into the particular calculation of a man reading a situation and making a final assessment of his options.

"If Voss had another thirty seconds on that embankment," he says, with the precise, unruffled delivery of someone making a point in an argument, "you never would have met her."

The room goes quiet.

I go quiet with it.

Not the quiet of restraint. Not the quiet of a man holding himself back from something. The quiet of a man who has run out of the particular kind of patience that leaves room for other outcomes, who has been carrying seven months of a dead accountant's trust and a girl's survival and a broken promise on Route 9, and who is now standing in a room with the man who ordered all of it, and who is hearing that man discuss thirty seconds as though the life he's describing is a line item on a balance sheet.

"Her name," I say, one final time, "is Willow."

Michaelson reaches inside his jacket.

He's fast, for a man in his early fifties who has always paid other people to be fast for him. Not fast enough.

I don't think about it after. There's nothing to think about. He made a choice with significant consequences.

I spend the next thirty minutes in his study, which is a study built by a man who believed in documentation—contracts, correspondence, financial instruments. Everything Dash and the forensic accountants will need to dismantle every shell company, recover every laundered dollar, and close every dirty account Michaelson Strategic Logistics has been running through humanitarian contract funds for the last decade. I copy what I need, secure what I can't copy, and leave the rest for the people I trust to come behind me with the proper chains of custody.

Dash calls as I'm walking out through the gate.

"Rourke's in a room," he says. "The people holding him are mine, not agency-routed. Documentation's already with the deputy director whose name doesn't appear anywhere in Rourke's access logs."

"Good."

"It's going to be loud in the morning."

"I know."

"Wolfe." His voice drops. "You okay?"

I look at my hands on the steering wheel in the dark. Split knuckles. Dried blood that isn't entirely mine. The kind of hands that have a long drive and a porch and a woman waiting at the end of it.

"I will be," I say. "I'm coming home."

The drive back takes an hour. I don't think about Michaelson or Voss or Rourke or any of the machinery that's going to grind forward now without my hand on it. I let Dash handle it. Dash has been handling things I couldn't afford to look away from long enough to manage for twenty years. He'll handle this.

I think about Willow instead.

The way she'd looked at me on the porch tonight with her hands shaking and her chin up, telling me to go. The way she'd said I'll be fine like she was daring herself to mean it, and then meant it, because that's who she is—a girl who gets handed the worst thing imaginable and finds the stubborn, specific will to mean it anyway. Her father was the same. I heard it in his voice across the days of terrified phone calls, the refusal to stop doing the right thing even when the right thing was costing him everything.

She doesn't know yet how much she's like him.

I'm going to spend a long time telling her.

Dawn is beginning somewhere behind the eastern ridge when I pull the SUV onto the gravel road and the cabin's porch light comes into view through the trees. Madelyn's vehicle is parked alongside Finn's truck. Every window in the cabin is lit. They've been awake all night—all of them—and I understand that without needing to see it, because these are the people who don't sleep when one of their own is out in the dark.

Willow is on the porch steps.

She's wrapped in a blanket, both hands around a mug, and she sees the headlights before I've even cut the engine. She's standing by the time I climb out of the SUV. I walk up the porch steps and she takes in the state of me—the blood, the bruises, the way I'm carrying my ribs—and her eyes fill, which she doesn't let become tears, because she's Daniel Thompson's daughter and Daniel Thompson's daughter doesn't fall apart until everything is accounted for.

"Voss?" she asks.

"Gone."

"Michaelson?"