Page 28 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"Gone."

"Rourke?"

"In custody. It'll be loud, but it'll hold." I look at her face in the porch light, needing to see her. "It's over, Willow. All of it. Nobody is coming for you. Not tonight, not any night after tonight."

Her breath comes out in a long, shaking exhale that she's clearly been holding for hours.

"You came back," she says.

"I told you I would."

She steps into me, and I hold on. I don't say anything for a long moment. I just hold her in the porch light with the forest quiet around us and the found family visible through the window behind us, and I let myself breathe for the first time since I sent her running into the dark with a gun in her hands and the hope that everything I'd taught her would be enough.

It was enough. She was more than enough.

Dash steps onto the porch and holds out the microdrive. "Forensic copy is done. Original stays with her."

I take it and turn to Willow.

"This is your father's original," I say. "Everything he risked his life to preserve—manifests, financial records, the security footage of Michaelson at the loading facility. It's all here. The records I copied at Michaelson's estate corroborate what's on it. Dash secured a forensic copy for the case. This one is yours."

She stares at it in my palm without reaching for it.

"What do I do with it?" she asks quietly.

"Whatever you decide." I hold her gaze. "Your father died trying to make sure this got out. He could have destroyed it. He could have walked away the night he saw what he saw in that loading facility and decided it wasn't his problem. He didn't. He copied it twice and he called a stranger because he thought the right thing still mattered even when it cost everything." I close her fingers around the drive. "What happens to it is yours to decide. Not mine. Not the agency's. Yours."

She looks down at her closed hand.

"He should get the credit," she says, so quietly I almost don't catch it. "His name should be attached to it. People should know who he was and what he did."

"Then that's what happens," I tell her. "His name goes on it. People know."

She looks up at me, and in her eyes I see something I haven't seen since the first night I brought her here—not the fear, not the careful defended distance, but the thing underneath all of it that her father must have seen every time he looked at her. Something permanent and determined and fully, completely alive.

"Okay," she says.

I take her face in both hands and press my mouth to her forehead. Her arms come up around my waist, careful of my ribs, and we stand there in the porch light while the sky begins its slow gray shift toward morning.

Behind us, through the cabin door, I hear Finn say something about coffee and Madelyn tell him to make enough for everyone.

Willow makes a sound against my chest that might be a laugh.

I press my lips to her hair.

Daniel Thompson called me nearly eight months ago because he trusted that somebody in the system was still clean enough to protect his family. He was right about that. He was just wrong about the timeline, and wrong about the cost, and wrong about everything except his daughter—about her being exactly the kind of person who would carry something worth saving without knowing she was carrying it.

She's carrying it now. She knows what it is. And she's going to decide what it becomes.

He got that part exactly right.

I take her hand and follow her inside.

That's enough.

eleven

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