Page 19 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

I sit up. The room is dark and unfamiliar in the particular way rooms get at two in the morning, and I don't bother finding my slippers before I go looking for him.

He's at the bottom of the stairs, sitting on the second step from the floor like he couldn't decide whether he was allowed to come up or not. He looks up when he hears me, and there's no argument in his face, no attempt to explain himself further. Just tired, open guilt, and underneath it, something that looks almost like bracing for another blow.

I sit down next to him. Not touching. Not yet.

"I'm still angry you didn't tell me," I say.

"I know."

"That doesn't go away because I understand why now. Understanding it isn't the same as forgiving it."

"I know that too." He keeps his hands loose on his knees, like he's making a point of not reaching for me. "I'm not asking you to forgive it tonight."

I look at him for a long moment. At the hands that pulled me out of a car that killed everyone else I loved. At the man who's spent seven months being careful with a truth that was mine to carry, not his to manage.

"But when I remember that night," I say quietly, "I remember someone's arms. I know now they were yours."

Something crosses his face—pain, maybe, or relief, or both at once.

"They were the first safe thing that happened to me in the worst night of my life," I say. "I need you to know that. Even now. Even angry."

He doesn't say anything. He just turns his hand over, palm up, on the step between us, an offer instead of a demand.

I put my hand in his.

"I won't hide something that's yours again," he says. "Whatever it costs me."

We don't move after that. I don't tell him I'm okay, because I'm not, not completely, and he doesn't ask me to pretend. We just sit there on the stairs in the dark, his thumb moving slow and steady over my knuckles, until the anger in my chest settles into something quieter—not gone, just willing to wait until morning.

Upstairs, his phone is still lit on the nightstand, waiting.

Neither of us goes to look at it yet.

We sit like that for another few minutes, long enough that I think maybe we'll stay here all night. Long enough that the worst of the adrenaline starts to drain out of me, replaced by something heavier and more real—exhaustion, maybe, or the weight of finally knowing the truth.

Then his phone buzzes.

It's a small sound, barely audible from upstairs, but Hudson goes rigid beside me. His thumb stops moving across my knuckles. Every muscle in his body tenses like he's just heard a siren.

"Stay here," he says quietly, and he's already moving, already pulling his hand away.

He takes the stairs two at a time. I hear him cross the bedroom, hear the phone light up his face in the darkness, and then there's a silence so complete it feels like the world has stopped turning.

When he comes back down, he's a different person.

Not the man who sat with me in the dark. Not the man who promised me honesty. This is the operative—the one who's spent twenty-five years hunting monsters. His face is carved from stone and his eyes are flat and certain.

"What is it?" I ask, already standing.

He doesn't answer. He just shows me the phone.

Voss is moving. Michaelson believes Thompson's second copy stayed with the daughter. Team mobilizing toward Silver Lake. Retrieval priority.

The words don't make sense at first. Then they do, and my stomach drops.

"The drive," I whisper.

"The drive," he confirms. His voice is ice. "They know about the second copy. They think you have it."