Page 26 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"Crying." He says it flat, the way men like him say everything—stripped of any texture that might make it human. "I was going to go back down. Sirens were already coming up the 9. I ran the time and it wasn't there."

Thirty seconds. Half a minute between Willow Thompson being alive right now and not.

I think about her standing on the porch an hour ago with her hands still shaking from what she'd done in the forest, and the way she'd said go like she meant it, like she was done being the person things happened to. I think about her father's voice on the phone telling me some things are worth saving.

"She has a name," I say. "It's Willow."

Voss doesn't answer.

He doesn't answer anything after that.

Michaelson's estate is forty minutes east in the SUV Dash left for me on the logging road—the clean vehicle, the one that doesn't exist on any registry that runs through the agency. The gates are closed when I arrive but the security system has been running on a rotation Voss's team set up, and Voss's team isn't available to change the rotation anymore. I'm inside the perimeter in four minutes.

The house is the kind of house that tells you everything about the man who built it before you've ever met him. Polished stone facade. Manicured grounds, even at this hour. A half-dozen exterior cameras positioned to create an impression of thorough security rather than actual security—the difference being that actual security accounts for the possibility that the threat is already inside. Michaelson has spent so many years being untouchable that he's built the aesthetic of safety rather than the substance of it.

I find him in the study on the second floor.

He's on the phone when I come through the door, dressed in a suit at three in the morning the way men like him dress when they're managing a crisis—armor before everything else. He's in his early fifties in this suit, polished and certain, and when he turns and sees me he does something I didn't fully expect.

He doesn't reach for a weapon. He doesn't run.

He hangs up the phone, sets it carefully on the desk, and looks at me with the specific calibrated calm of a man who has bought his way out of every serious problem he's ever encountered and believes, right up until the moment he stops believing anything, that he can buy his way out of this one too.

"Agent Wolfe," he says, like I'm a scheduled appointment running slightly late. "You look terrible."

"Voss is dead."

Something flickers behind his eyes and disappears. "Nolan was an asset. His loss is⁠—"

"The Thompson family," I say. "Daniel. Margaret. Their son. Their names were Daniel, Margaret, and Tommy. He was twelve years old."

Michaelson's expression doesn't change. That's the thing about men who have ordered people removed for thirty years—they've long since rebuilt the neural pathways that would make a twelve-year-old's name land with any weight.

"Thompson was an employee who accessed files he had no authorization to access," he says. "He made a choice with significant consequences. That's a simple matter of cause and effect."

"He found your manifests. He found the shell accounts. He found footage of you standing three feet from a man you had killed."

"He involved himself in business that didn't concern him."

"He was trying to do the right thing." My voice stays level. I'm working to keep it there. "He had a wife and two children and he was terrified, and he called a federal task force because he believed that the right thing mattered. He believed that the system he was trying to hand evidence to was clean enough to protect him."

"Clearly he was mistaken about that."

The smile that comes with that sentence is small and controlled and not directed at me. It's the smile of a man reminding himself that he's smarter than the room he's in, that he has people in the right places, that the federal agent standing in front of him with blood on his shirt is a problem with a financial solution the way every problem has a financial solution.

"Thompson's daughter," he continues, rounding his desk with the unhurried movement of a man who owns every room he walks into. "She's been a loose thread for seven months. Daniel made a second copy of what he took from me. I know that much. I don't know where he put it, but I know what he was—sentimental, careful, the kind of man who trusts his family more than his own security. He gave it to her somehow. I want you to understand that this was always about closing that thread. There's nothing personal in it."

"Her name," I say, "is Willow."

He pauses. Looks at me with something that might be curiosity, if curiosity could be this empty.

"Voss told me he heard her crying in the wreck," I say. "He was going to go back down. Your people knew a twenty-year-old girl was trapped in that car with her dead family and Voss intended to finish her. He ran out of time because I was already on the way."

"Yes." Michaelson says it simply, like a confirmation in a board meeting. "You buried her file. Seven months of resources spent hiding a loose thread from me. Rather extraordinary commitment for a single girl who may not even know what she's carrying."

"She's not carrying anything. She's not a witness, and she's not a courier. She's Daniel Thompson's daughter."

"She's the only lead I have to what he hid⁠—"