Page 23 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

Another crash from downstairs. Louder. Someone is inside.

"Rourke," Hudson says, more to himself than to me. "He's active right now."

The perimeter alert on his phone cuts to red. He glances at it and his expression goes lethal.

"North camera just went dark," he says. "Ninety seconds before they hit the door."

He grabs my wrist and pulls me toward the bedroom door that leads to the back staircase.

"Three of them inside," he says, voice low and deadly calm. "Run. Back door. The path we walked yesterday. Gun's on the hall table." He presses his keys into my other hand. "If I'm not out in ten minutes you get in the truck and you call Dash. You don't wait for me."

"Hudson—"

"Go." He shoves me through the doorway hard enough that I stumble. "Move."

I run.

Bare feet hit the wooden stairs. My heart is slamming so hard I can barely hear anything else. I grab the handgun from the hall table without breaking stride, the grip familiar now from days of practice, and shove through the back door into the cold night air.

The path is narrow and uneven. Branches scrape my arms and legs. I don't stop. Behind me the cabin erupts—shouts, the crack of a shot, then another. The sounds are wrong in the dark, too loud, too close, and every instinct I have is screaming at me to keep running.

Then a figure steps out of the shadows directly ahead of me, cutting in from the tree line to my left. He's big, moving fast, and the way he comes at me is deliberate—not someone stumbling onto me by accident.

I don't think. My body does what Hudson spent four days drilling into it.

I stop moving. I plant my feet. I bring the gun up with both hands the way he showed me, exhale, and stop thinking about the noise.

He's still reaching for his weapon when I fire.

The sound is enormous in the dark forest and the recoil kicks up my arms and I can't tell if I'm shaking more from the cold or from what I just did. He goes down hard in the dirt ten feet in front of me and doesn't move.

I stand there for three full seconds unable to breathe.

Then I make myself check the path ahead. Clear. Make myself check the tree line. Nothing moving. Hudson's voice is in my head—don't freeze, stay moving, frozen is dead—and I force my legs to carry me forward, off the main path and behind the thick pine the way he showed me during the security walks. I press my back to the bark, knees bent, gun still up, and wait.

My hands won't stop shaking. My whole body is shaking. I keep seeing the man drop, keep hearing that shot split the night open, and somewhere underneath the horror of what I just did is something else—small and stubborn and alive. I'm still here. I made a choice and I'm still here.

The forest goes quiet. Then I hear footsteps on the path.

I track them with the barrel before I hear his voice.

"Willow. It's me. Don't shoot."

Hudson steps around the pine tree and stops. He takes in the gun in my hands, still pointed at the path. Then he sees the man down in the dirt twenty feet back, and his expression shifts through something I don't have a name for—shock and relief and something fierce and proud all at once.

"That was the third one," I say. My voice sounds strange. Too flat. "He came from the cabin. He came after me."

Hudson crosses to the man, checks him, looks back at me. "He's dead. Good. That's all three inside."

I already knew he was dead. "All three?"

"Two down in the cabin, and now him." He reaches me in three strides and gets both hands on my face, scanning me for injuries. "Are you hurt?"

"No." I lower the gun finally. My arms are shaking badly now that the threat is gone and my body has figured out it can afford to fall apart a little. "So it's over?"

"There were four." His jaw is tight. "Voss went around the back the second the alarms cut out. He never came inside. He's already into the tree line, heading northeast." His eyes cut to the dark woods over my shoulder and I see it—the calculation, the urgency, the thing he needs to do that isn't standing here with me.

"He's the link to Michaelson," I say.