Page 3 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"Somewhere Willow will keep safe."

"Daniel, I need to know where."

"If something happens to me, she'll find it." A long pause stretches on the line, and when he speaks again his voice has gone soft, almost peaceful, like a man who's already made peace with something I don't understand yet. "Some things are worth saving."

I don't know what that means. I don't have time to ask him to explain it, and some part of me assumes he's talking about his family, about the life he's trying to protect, not about a physical location I should be memorizing.

"Nothing is going to happen to you," I say instead.

"You don't know that."

I don't answer, because he's right, and we both know it.

"Two miles," I say instead. "Route 9. We'll be there."

"Thank you," he says. "For believing me. For not thinking I was crazy."

"You're not crazy, Daniel. You're the reason this ends."

I don't know yet how true that sentence is going to turn out to be, or how much it's going to cost him.

I'm in position at the gas station forty minutes before the pickup window when Dash's voice comes through my earpiece, tight and fast.

"Wolfe. We've got a problem."

"Talk to me."

"Traffic cam three miles back on Route 9 just picked up a black sedan running parallel to the Thompsons' route. Wasn't there an hour ago. It's moving like it knows exactly where they're headed."

Ice drops straight through my chest. "Get eyes on the vehicle. Now."

"On it⁠—"

Gunfire crackles through the earpiece, distant and then not distant enough. I'm already running for the SUV, already screaming into the radio for backup, already doing math I don't want to do—distance, time, how fast I can get there, how fast is not fast enough.

By the time I reach the stretch of Route 9 where the guardrail is torn open like paper, it's already over.

The Thompsons' sedan is twenty feet down the embankment, crumpled around a tree, smoke curling up into headlights that are still somehow on. I go down that slope faster than I've moved in years, my weapon drawn on instinct even though every instinct in my body already knows there's nothing left here to shoot.

Daniel Thompson is dead in the driver's seat.

Margaret Thompson is dead beside him.

Their son—twelve years old, I'd learn later, though right now he's just a small, still shape in the back seat—is dead too.

And curled against the far door, blood running from a gash above her eyebrow, glass in her hair, shaking so hard her teeth are audible even over the ringing in my own ears, is a girl.

Alive.

"Hey." My voice comes out rough, stripped of every hard edge I usually carry into a scene like this. "Hey, I'm right here. I've got you."

She looks at me like she doesn't understand the words, like language stopped meaning anything the moment the car went off the road. I get the door open, get my hands under her, careful of what might be broken, and she comes apart against my chest in a way that guts me more than any crime scene has in twenty-five years.

Sirens are already climbing the hill behind us. Whoever did this had to be close—close enough to hear them coming, close enough to run before I could get here. I don't know yet who they are or what they wanted, only that they're gone and she's still breathing.

I carry her up that embankment myself. I don't let the paramedics take her out of my sight for one second, because somewhere between the wreck and the ambulance, I already know two things with a certainty that settles into my bones and doesn't leave.

The first is that I failed Daniel Thompson. I promised him I would get his family out. I promised him nothing would happen. He trusted me with the four most important people in his life, and I got there four minutes too late to save any of them but one.