Chapter 4
four
. . .
Rhys
I wake up with Willow soft and warm against my chest, her curls spilling over my arm, one of her legs tangled with mine.
The morning light cuts across the bed and catches on the scars along her hip.
I rest my hand there without thinking, tracing the raised edges with my thumb.
She doesn’t pull away. She just sighs in her sleep and presses closer.
I’ve never been the kind of man who plans a future around anyone. The job doesn’t allow it. You stay sharp, you stay alone, you stay alive. Looking at her now, that rule feels like something I made up a long time ago for a different man.
I let her sleep a little longer. When she finally stirs, those brown eyes open slow and find mine. There’s no panic in them this time. Just quiet recognition.
“Morning,” she murmurs.
“Morning.” I brush a curl off her cheek. “You hungry?”
She nods. I kiss the top of her head and climb out of bed before I can decide to keep her there all day.
Downstairs, I make coffee and scramble eggs while she showers.
When she comes down in one of my t-shirts and a pair of soft shorts, the sight of her in my clothes hits harder than it should.
The shirt hangs off one shoulder and barely covers the tops of her thighs. I want to drag her right back upstairs.
We eat at the counter. She steals bites of bacon off my plate when she thinks I’m not looking. I let her. After, she helps me clean up again, and the domestic quiet of it settles something restless in my chest. I could get used to this. I already am.
The rest of the day passes in a strange kind of peace.
I show her the perimeter of the property, the places where the cameras are hidden, the old logging road that leads out if we ever need a second exit.
She listens carefully, asks smart questions, and doesn’t flinch when I hand her a small handgun and teach her the basics.
She’s a quick study. Stubborn, too. When she keeps missing the target, she just resets her stance and tries again until she hits it.
By the time the sun starts dropping behind the trees, the air between us is charged again.
We’ve been circling each other all day—small touches, lingering looks, the kind of silence that says we’re both thinking about what happened earlier on the kitchen counter.
I make dinner. She sets the table. We talk about nothing important and everything that matters.
Her favorite songs. The way she used to bake with her little brother on Sunday mornings.
The fact that I haven’t taken a real vacation in twelve years.
She laughs at something before I even finish the sentence, and it derails me completely.
"Twelve years," she says again, like she's tasting the number. "That's not a vacation problem, Hudson. That's a personality problem."
"I've been busy."
"Everyone's busy. You've been avoiding rest like it's a tactical threat." She props her chin on her hand, studying me across the table with an expression that's equal parts amused and genuinely curious. "What would you even do? If someone forced you. Gun to your head, go relax."
"Fish, probably."
"That's not relaxing, that's just work with worse odds."
"It's relaxing when nobody's shooting at you."
She throws a piece of bread crust at me. I catch it out of the air without looking, which only makes her narrow her eyes further, like I've cheated somehow.
"Fine," she says. "What did twenty-five-year-old Hudson want? Before all this. Before you turned into a man who apparently thinks silence and competence are a personality."
Nobody's asked me that in longer than I want to admit. I turn it over for a second, surprised by how far back I have to reach.
"I wanted to build things," I say finally. "Actual things. Houses, furniture. My grandfather had a shop in his garage, built half the furniture in his house with his own hands. I used to think I'd do that. Work with wood instead of case files."
"So what happened?"
"The Bureau happened. I was good at the other thing. Good enough that it stopped feeling like a choice." I shrug, because it's the truth and it doesn't need dressing up. "I still think about it sometimes. There's a table saw in the shed I haven't touched in six years."
"You have a shed with a table saw and you've never once mentioned it." She looks genuinely offended. "What else are you hiding out there? A pottery wheel? A secret garden?"
"Just the saw. And some very expensive dust."
That gets a real laugh out of her, the kind that makes her shoulders drop, and something in my chest loosens at the sound of it.
"Your turn," I say. "What did twenty-year-old Willow want? Before."
She goes quiet for a second, but it's not the heavy kind of quiet. She's thinking, turning something private over before she decides to hand it to me.
"I wanted to open a bakery," she says. "A real one. Not big. Just mine. I used to draw the sign in the margins of my notebooks in college like an idiot. I had names picked out. Terrible names."
"Worse than what you're about to tell me?"
"Flour Power." She says it completely straight-faced. "I was very proud of that one at nineteen."
"That's genuinely horrifying."
"I had a whole logo sketched. A wheat stalk wearing sunglasses."
"Please tell me that's not real."
"It's extremely real and I stand by it." She's laughing again, and I find myself grinning back at her without meaning to, caught somewhere between amused and wrecked by how easy this is.
"I wanted normal things, Hudson. A shop with a bell on the door.
A dog. I wanted to date terrible men in my early twenties and have humiliating stories to tell about it later.
I wanted Tommy to bring his awful girlfriends home so I could give him a hard time the way he gave me a hard time. "
The way she says her brother's name doesn't crack the way it used to. There's still weight in it, but it's steadier now, like something she's learning to carry instead of something that keeps ambushing her.
"He used to steal the good chocolate chips before I could put them in the batter," she says.
"Every single time. I'd measure them out and turn around for two seconds and half of them would be gone.
He'd have this look on his face like he had no idea what I was talking about, chocolate literally on his teeth. "
"Sounds like a menace."
"He was the best person I knew." She says it simply, without the tremor I'm braced for. "I used to think I'd bake at his wedding someday. Make something ridiculous and three-tiered and probably lopsided."
I don't offer her sympathy. I don't think she wants it, not in this particular moment, sitting across from me with flour still on her memory instead of on her hands. So instead I just say, "Flour Power would've made a hell of a wedding cake."
She kicks me under the table, but she's smiling when she does it.
"You're supposed to feel bad for me right now," she says.
"I feel plenty. I'm just not going to pretend the name was good."
"You're insufferable."
"You like it."
"Unfortunately." She exhales, and something in her posture settles, like she's set the weight down somewhere safe for the night instead of carrying it back to bed with her. "Twenty-year-old me would be extremely confused by all of this, you know. The cabin. The gun on the counter. You."
"What would she think of me?"
Willow tilts her head, considering me with a slow, deliberate thoroughness that makes my pulse pick up despite myself. "She'd think you were terrifying," she says. "And she'd be right. And she'd still want you to kiss her."
I stand, rounding the table, and pull her up out of her chair by the hand before she can say anything else clever.
We finish the dishes in comfortable silence, her hands in the warm water and mine drying what she passes me. When the last plate is done, I set the towel aside and lead her upstairs without a word. She follows.
In the bedroom, I undress her slowly this time.
No rush. No counter. Just the big bed and the low light and the sound of her breathing as I peel my shirt off her body.
I kiss every inch I uncover—her collarbone and the soft curve of her stomach, taking my time until every place I touch stops feeling like a question.
When she's bare, I guide her down onto the sheets and settle over her. I take her face in my hands and make her look at me.
"Keep your eyes on me," I tell her. "The whole time. I want to see everything."
She nods, already a little breathless. I push into her slow and deep, watching the way her mouth falls open and her eyes go dark.
I don't let her hide. Every time she tries to look away, I tip her chin back until those brown eyes are locked on mine again.
I move inside her like we have all the time in the world—long, deliberate strokes that make her nails dig into my shoulders and her thighs tighten around my hips.
"Hudson—"
"I've got you." I brush my thumb across her lower lip. "Feel how deep I am? You're mine. All of you is mine."
She comes first, quiet and shaking, eyes never leaving mine. I follow her over the edge a few thrusts later, buried as deep as I can get, forehead pressed to hers while I spill inside her. We stay like that after, breathing the same air, her fingers tracing idle patterns on my back.
Eventually I roll us so she's tucked against my chest. My hand settles at her hip again. I stare at the ceiling and start talking before I can stop myself.
"I've been thinking about the cabin," I say. "About making it ours. Putting your name on the deed next to mine. Building a real kitchen so you can bake whenever you want. Maybe adding a porch swing out front."
She’s quiet for a second. “That’s a lot of planning for a protection detail.”
“It’s not a protection detail anymore. You know that.
” I tighten my arm around her. “I want a house that feels like ours. I want a ring on your finger so every man who looks at you knows you’re taken.
I want mornings like this one for the rest of my life.
I’m not asking you to decide anything tonight.
I’m just telling you where my head’s at. ”
She presses a kiss to my chest. “You’re serious.”
“Dead serious.”
We fall quiet after that. Her breathing eventually evens out into sleep. I stay awake longer, mapping the future in my head—her laughter in this house, her curves under my hands every night, the way she’d look with my last name. Wolfe. Willow Wolfe. It fits.
Sometime after midnight, my phone vibrates on the nightstand with a secure alert I can't ignore.
I ease out from under her carefully, pull on jeans, and take the phone downstairs.
The message is short and ugly. A dark-web forum I've been monitoring for months just lit up.
Someone is offering a contract on "Daniel Thompson's surviving daughter.
" The description matches Willow close enough to make my blood run cold.
Location data puts the interested parties within a hundred miles of Silver Lake.
I go still.
Twenty-five years of this work and I've never felt fear like this. Not for myself. For her.
I spend the next hour on encrypted calls.
I cancel every open case I have. I call in favors from men who owe me and men who fear me.
I lock down the cabin's security system tighter than it's ever been—cameras, sensors, every entry point wired and monitored.
I also request a second team, but I keep them well back, stationed on the far tree line half a mile out, watching the access road and the ridge trail for anyone approaching.
They're eyes, not a wall. Pure surveillance, positioned far enough out that Willow will never see them or feel like she's living inside a checkpoint.
It's the only way to get advance warning without turning the cabin into something that scares her worse than the threat itself.
It's not nothing. A team watching the approach means we'll likely see trouble coming before it's on top of us.
But I know better than most men alive that distance buys warning, not certainty.
If someone already knows the terrain—if they've got the property details, the blind spots, the one stretch of ridge where the tree cover breaks the sightline—a team a half mile out can call it in and still not close the gap in time.
By the time the sky starts to lighten, I've made one thing brutally clear to everyone involved: nothing comes before her.
Not the job. Not the agency. Not my own history.
If anyone comes for her, they will regret it in ways they can't imagine.
I make coffee and wait for her to wake up. When she comes downstairs in another one of my shirts, hair still messy from sleep, I pull out a chair at the table and nod for her to sit.
She sees the look on my face and goes quiet.
“There’s been movement,” I tell her. No sugarcoating. “Someone put a contract out on the dark web for Daniel Thompson's surviving daughter. They believe you may have the second copy of the evidence your father took from Michaelson. They’re closer than I want them to be.”
Her hands tighten around the coffee mug I set in front of her. “How close?”
“Close enough that I’m not taking chances.
” I lean forward, elbows on the table, and hold her gaze.
“I need you to hear me clearly, Willow. Anyone who comes for you will regret it. I don’t care who they are or who they work for.
I will end the threat. Completely. You are not going back to looking over your shoulder. Not while I’m breathing.”
She searches my face for a long moment. Whatever she finds there settles something in her. She reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers.
“Okay,” she says softly. “I trust you.”
Those three words hit harder than any of the filthy ones she gave me last night.
I turn my hand over and lace our fingers together. “Good. Because I’m not letting anything touch you. Not now. Not ever.”
She squeezes my hand once and doesn’t let go.
Outside, the forest is quiet. Inside, the only thing that matters is the woman sitting across from me and the future I’ve already started building around her.
Anyone who tries to take that away is going to learn exactly how far I’m willing to go.