Page 4 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

The second thing I know—watching this girl clutch a small wooden box to her chest like it's the only solid thing left in the world, watching her flinch at every sound, watching blood dry on skin that's shaking too hard to warm itself—is that I am not going to fail her, too.

At the hospital, I make a decision that isn't in any protocol, isn't sanctioned by anyone above me, and isn't something I'll ever regret.

I bury her.

Not literally—God, not that. I bury her file. I flag her as deceased on the report that goes up the chain, the same report that lists Daniel, Margaret, and their son. I falsify just enough, quietly enough, that anyone looking for a surviving Thompson daughter finds nothing but four names on a coroner's list. I move her to a private room under an assumed patient number. I stand outside her door for six hours while she sleeps, because the extraction route was compromised from inside the operation, and I need to know how deep it goes before I trust her to any official channel.

We audit the route after the crash. The audit is inconclusive. I can't prove where the leak came from, only that it exists, and that means I can't trust the standard channels to keep her safe. So I go outside the system instead, to people I've trusted with my life and never once with my badge—people who've helped me disappear witnesses before, quietly, off the books, when the official channels were too slow or too exposed.

Between us, in the six weeks while Willow is still in that hospital bed relearning how to walk without wincing, we build her a name. Documentation clean enough that no one asks questions. It isn't full protection—it isn't meant to be. It's a door I can shut behind her, fast and quiet, small enough that nobody watching the front of the house notices it opening. We pick the city together based on nothing more than distance and obscurity—far enough from anything Michaelson's people would think to check, ordinary enough to disappear into.

That's where my part ends.

I don't pick the apartment. I don't make a call to get her the job. When she walks into that bakery two days after we get her settled and asks if they're hiring, that's her, not me—her nerve, her decision, the first thing she's chosen for herself since the night her family died. She finds the apartment above it on her own, signs the lease with her own new name, pays the rent every month out of a paycheck she earned standing on her feet at four in the morning. I gave her the ground to stand on. Everything she built on top of it is hers.

I check on her anyway. More than protocol would ever require. I drive by at hours I have no professional reason to be in that city, park half a block down, watch the light in her window until it goes dark and I know she's safe for one more night. I tell myself it's surveillance. That the threat against her hasn't disappeared just because seven months have passed quietly.

It isn't, and I know it isn't, even as I tell myself it is.

Because every time I close my eyes, I hear Daniel Thompson's voice on the other end of a phone call, thanking me for believing him. I see a girl curled against a car door with blood in her hair, clutching a wooden box like it's the only thing keeping her tethered to the earth.

I couldn't save her father. I couldn't save her mother, or her brother.

But I am going to spend every resource I have, every favor I've earned in twenty-five years, every hour I'm not sleeping, making sure nothing and no one ever gets close enough to hurt Willow Thompson again.

I don't know yet that seven months from now, the bakery will post a photograph of a cake to its public social media page. I don't know that Willow will be visible behind the counter in the background, or that Michaelson's people will run the image through facial-recognition software and get a match. I don't know that a single photograph is going to undo all of it in a single afternoon.

I don't know yet that when it happens, I'm going to walk through her door and feel something far more dangerous than guilt settle into my chest the moment I see her face.

I only know, standing in that hospital corridor with her blood still drying on my hands, that I already failed one person who trusted me with everything.

I am not doing it again.

one

. . .

Willow Thompson

I lock the front door of the bakery and flip the sign to Closed. The last customer left twenty minutes ago, and the place is finally quiet. Flour still dusts the counter in soft white patches. The ovens are cooling, ticking softly as the heat fades. I wipe the same spot on the counter twice because my hands need something to do.

Seven months.

That’s how long it’s been since the crash. Seven months since I woke up in a hospital bed with my left side on fire and learned my parents and my little brother were gone. Seven months of a new city, a new last name, and the same nightmare that still makes me reach across an empty bed for people who aren’t there anymore.

I’m doing okay. Mostly. I show up to work every morning. I smile at the regulars. I even laugh sometimes when the older woman who orders the same blueberry muffin every Tuesday tells me the same joke about her cat. But the scars on my hip and thigh still hide under jeans and long shirts, and lately the back of my neck has been prickling like someone’s watching me.

I tell myself it’s leftover paranoia. Trauma does weird things to your brain. Still, I glance out the front window one more time before I shut off the lights.

The street is quiet. A few cars pass. The streetlight across from the bakery flickers the way it always does. Nothing looks different. I turn away and start wiping down the display case, forcing my shoulders to relax.

I’m happy-ish. That’s the word I’ve settled on. Not happy. Not broken. Somewhere in the middle where I can function and sometimes even forget for whole hours at a time. I rent the tiny apartment above the bakery. I keep the rent low by helping with early morning prep. I don’t make friends. I don’t date. I keep my head down and try to build something quiet enough that the past can’t find me.

It almost works.

Almost.

I finish the display case and move to the espresso machine, wiping every surface even though it’s already clean. The silence presses in. I hate the silence more than anything. Silence leaves too much room for the memories to crawl back in—the sound of metal screaming, the way the world flipped, the silence after that was so much worse.