Chapter 9
nine
. . .
Willow
The next few days settle into something that feels dangerously close to normal.
Hudson and I move around the cabin like we've been doing it for months instead of less than a week.
He cooks. I clean up. We take walks along the tree line where he points out the camera angles and the best places to take cover if we ever need them.
At night he pulls me into the big bed and makes me say I'm his while he's buried deep inside me, and I say it without hesitation now because it's true. I'm all in.
The realization hits me on a quiet afternoon while I'm standing in the kitchen wearing one of his t-shirts and nothing else.
He's outside checking the generator. I'm slicing fruit for later, and the scars on my hip and thigh are fully visible every time the shirt rides up.
I don't tug it down. I don't angle my body away from the window.
I just keep cutting strawberries and let the sunlight land on every raised mark without flinching.
When Hudson comes back inside he stops in the doorway and looks at me for a long second. His eyes drop to the scars, then lift to my face. Whatever he sees there makes his expression go soft in a way that still catches me off guard.
"You're not hiding them anymore," he says.
"No." I set the knife down and turn to face him fully. "I'm not. You looked at them like they were something worth wanting. I'm trying to believe you."
He crosses the room, cups my face in both hands, and kisses me slow and deep. When he pulls back his forehead rests against mine.
"They're part of you. That means they're mine to take care of. You don't ever have to hide from me."
I believe him. That's the part that scares me a little less every day.
That afternoon, on the back porch with the trees pressing close on every side, Hudson runs me through the shooting drills again.
He stands behind me with his chest against my back and his hands over mine, correcting my grip, talking low into my ear about breathing and sight line and the half-second of stillness before a trigger pull that's the difference between hitting what you're aiming at and missing completely.
"You're anticipating the shot," he says. "You're flinching before it happens. Stop thinking about the noise."
"Easy for you to say."
"You're going to thank me later." He adjusts my elbow slightly. "Again."
I exhale. I stop thinking about the sound. I squeeze.
The can he'd set up on the fence post twenty feet out spins off into the grass.
He makes a low sound of approval against my hair that does things to my concentration. I try not to smile and fail completely.
"Again," he says, but his voice has dropped into something warmer, and I can feel him smiling too.
That night we fall asleep tangled together the way we always do now—my head on his chest, his arm locked around my waist, his hand resting over the scars like a promise.
The nightmares stay away again; no screaming metal, no empty hospital bed, no reaching for people who aren't there.
I dream about the porch swing he keeps talking about and the way his voice sounds when he says my name like it already belongs to him.
I wake up to the sound of glass breaking.
It's 2 a.m. according to the clock on the nightstand.
The cabin is dark. Hudson is already moving before I'm fully upright, shoving the covers back and reaching for the gun he keeps on his side of the bed.
He checks his phone in the same motion—a habit now, always the phone first—and I see his jaw tighten at whatever's on the screen.
He stares at it for another second, then swears low and vicious.
"What?" I ask, but he's already pulling me out of bed.
"Outer team got reassigned thirty minutes ago. Command authorization, legitimate credentials." His voice is flat, dangerous. "Access road and ridge trail both pulled. We're blind out there."
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.
"And to the leak in my team." Hudson looks back at me. "If Voss disappears, Michaelson disappears with him. Everything your father died for walks out of the country in the next forty-eight hours."
I think about my father staying late at the office. Copying files with shaking hands. Calling a stranger because he wanted to do the right thing. I think about his voice in the recipe book's margins, his handwriting in the corners of my mother's pages.
"Go," I say.
"Dash and Finn are twenty minutes out. Madelyn's with them."
"I'll be fine." I mean it. Somehow, standing in the dark with a gun I just used and a man I just put down, I mean it completely. "Go get him."
Hudson pulls me in hard and fast, both arms locked around me, his mouth against my hair. It lasts three seconds. It feels like everything.
Then he's gone, moving into the dark woods at a speed that makes clear he was built for exactly this.
I lower myself to sit against the pine tree with my back to the bark and the gun across my knees and wait for the sound of Dash's truck on the gravel road.
I stop hiding the scars.
I stop pretending this is temporary.
And now the man I fell for has disappeared into the dark after the last ghost of the nightmare that took my family, and I am not the girl I was seven months ago—the one who could only wait inside a wrecked car for someone to come and find her.
I press my forehead to my knees and breathe.
He's going to come back.
And so am I.