3. Emma
THREE
EMMA
Emma clocked the wrongness before she saw a single thing out of place.
Not a smell. Not a sound. Only a shift in the air, the kind you get when someone’s been standing where they shouldn’t.
She’d registered it exactly twice before in seventeen years of this job, and both times had preceded a very bad afternoon.
She set her coffee on the corner of her desk and did a slow lap of her own office, casing it the way she’d case a stranger’s.
Nothing broken. Nothing obviously missing.
The conference table still held its usual disaster of ledgers, tax filings, wire logs, and donor reports—Gerri’s entire charitable empire, spread out exactly where Emma had left it.
Except not quite. The left stack sat half an inch too far right.
The Wilder Hope folder was closed, and Emma never closed that folder mid-case, not even for lunch.
The whiteboard on the east wall—her evidence map, already dense with her own handwriting—hadn’t been touched at all.
That was the part that made her stomach drop. They hadn’t wanted her conclusions. They’d wanted her sources.
She crossed to the drawer, pulled it open slower than she needed to, and found the flash drive sitting exactly where she’d left it.
Still there. Untouched. That, more than an empty drawer ever could have, was what made her stomach turn over.
Nobody stole a flash drive anymore. Not when cloning one took ninety seconds and left it looking exactly as boring as it had that morning. She plugged it in, pulled the access log, and watched three months of donor records light up under a timestamp that wasn’t hers.
Forty minutes. That was the whole window—between the moment she’d stepped out for mid-morning coffee and the moment she’d walked back in—and someone had used it to let themselves into her office, sit down at her desk, and copy every file she had on the Wilder Hope fraud without breaking so much as a paperclip.
They’re not worried about getting caught. They’re worried about being slow.
She swept the rest of the office anyway—every drawer, every cabinet—and came up with nothing else touched. Only the files. Exactly the part that mattered, and wasn’t that a compliment she’d have gladly lived without.
Then she changed every password she owned. Email, cloud storage, the firm’s shared drive, her banking app for good measure. Paranoia had never gotten her killed. Complacency had a worse résumé.
She was three passwords deep when Gerri let herself in without knocking, a pastry box balanced on one hip, dressed for exactly this kind of morning and clearly proud of it.
“You’ve rearranged your desk.” Gerri set the box down and went very still, scanning the room once, twice. “No. You didn’t touch a thing. Someone else did, and did a mediocre job hiding it.”
“Nine seconds. New record.”
“Decades of practice reading rooms that lie to me.” Gerri’s voice stayed light. Her expression didn’t—sharp now, the look Emma was learning meant not amused, currently plotting. “Anything taken?”
“Nothing taken. Everything copied.”
“Which means they know exactly how close you’re getting.” Gerri opened the box, plucked out a croissant, and put it directly into Emma’s hand without asking whether she wanted it. “Eat. I’m sending someone.”
“Someone.”
“Best security firm in the city. Possibly the hemisphere. Run by a man I trust with my actual life, which is a shorter list than you’d think.
” Gerri delivered it as settled fact, a decision she’d been sitting on for months, waiting for the right excuse, with only the paperwork left to finish. “He’ll be in touch.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard, Gerri. I need a better lock.”
“Darling, you need far more than a lock.” Gerri patted her cheek on the way out, several steps ahead of an argument Emma hadn’t finished building. “Eat the croissant. You look like you’re planning a murder, and while I fully support the impulse, it’s terrible for your pores.”
“Gerri—”
“Don’t Gerri me. I’ve had that look aimed at me by better-armed men than you, dear, and I outlasted every one of them.” She was at the door, not breaking stride. “Lock your actual locks. Eat a vegetable at some point today, for once in your life. I’ll see you soon.”
She left before Emma could argue, which was, Emma was fast discovering, the only way conversations with Gerri Wilder ever ended.
The elevator doors slid open and every rational thought in Emma’s head clocked out early.
She hit the elevator’s call button on her way out for a lunch she had no plans to actually eat, laptop bag on one shoulder, mind swirling down three different paths at once. The doors parted. There he was.
Broad shoulders, charcoal wool instead of the tux, filling the elevator so completely, it seemed built around him instead of the other way around.
Oh, her brain offered, unhelpfully. Ballroom guy.
He looked equally wrecked—jaw working, every rehearsed line of this exact moment falling out of his head the second the doors opened. Neither of them moved. The elevator started to close, and his hand shot out to stop it, keeping the door open.
“You,” he said. Not a full sentence. Barely a word.
“You,” Emma agreed, equally useless, her professional composure clocking back in a beat too late to undo what her face had already done.
A courier tried to squeeze past them into the car, took one look at the two of them, and decided to find another elevator.
“Emma Burke.” He said her name slow, testing its weight, syllable by syllable, a man handling a fact new and unexpectedly heavy. “Jace Maddox. Maddox Tactical Securities.”
Of course. Of course the man who’d caught her mid-collision at a black-tie gala—the one she’d spent an entire cab ride failing to stop thinking about—was also the bodyguard Gerri had assigned to her life without a vote.
Emma had built a career on spotting patterns.
This one registered less as a pattern and more as a cosmic joke at her expense.
“You’re the security firm.”
“I’m the CEO of the security firm.” He stepped out of the elevator, close enough that she caught the same low, warm note under his cologne that had derailed her thinking a full day earlier. “Gerri sent me.”
The elevator doors closed behind him, and they stood in the hall.
“She didn’t mention a name.”
“Gerri,” he said, exhausted the particular way only a lifetime of knowing her could produce, “likes a dramatic reveal.”
“Does she do this often? Assign you to strangers?”
“Never once. Which is either reassuring or considerably less reassuring, depending how you want to read it.” He watched her the way a man hands over one piece of a puzzle, to see if she’d catch it.
She caught it. She tucked it away instead of reacting to it, which took more effort than she’d ever admit out loud. Somewhere behind her ribs, a small, unhelpful part of her brain noted that most men didn’t hand her puzzle pieces. Most men wanted her to stop finding things, full stop.
They ended up in her office, because apparently that’s where this was always going to happen. Emma spent the first ninety seconds deciding whether she was furious or merely flustered, which registered as the worse problem, standing this close to a man built without a warning label.
“I appreciate the concern.” She dropped her bag, put the desk between them, a makeshift border checkpoint, and crossed her arms. “I don’t need a security detail. I need Gerri to stop making unilateral decisions about my life.”
“Someone cloned your hard drive this morning.” He didn’t sit.
He prowled the edge of her office instead, clocking exits and sightlines with a thoroughness that told her this wasn’t his first office assessment.
“That’s not a lock problem. That’s a coordinated surveillance operation.
On a woman investigating organized theft.
I’ve protected federal judges with less exposure than you’ve got right now. ”
“I’ve testified against three mob accountants and one extremely aggressive IRS auditor named Dennis. Men in expensive suits don’t rattle me.”
“Good.” His eyes went warm and sharp at once, amber deepening, dangerously close to delight. “I’m not trying to rattle you. I’m trying to keep you breathing long enough to finish what you started.”
“By assigning yourself to me. Without my consent.”
“By offering.” Every line of him said offering was a courtesy he’d skip in a heartbeat if she made him. “Say no if you want. I’d advise against it. Someone’s already inside your systems and getting bold enough to try daylight next. But it’s your call.”
Emma turned his own website against him, pulling it up without asking, because if he got to case her office, she got to case him right back.
Client testimonials she couldn’t verify.
A résumé with the scope of a small country’s defense budget.
A press photo of him in tactical gear that she looked at for two full seconds longer than professional curiosity strictly required, and one line on the About page that made her look up.
“You’ve never lost a client.”
“No.”
“Ever.”
“Not once.” No pride in it, and the flatness of it landed harder than bragging would have. “Don’t plan on starting with you.”
“How many people work for you?”
“Enough.”
“Not an answer.”
“Twenty-two. Ex-military, ex-federal, two detectives who got bored of paperwork.” Rattled off easily, a question he’d clearly answered a hundred times and never once minded. “You’ll meet four of them by the end of the week, if you say yes. Five if you count me.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I post someone outside anyway, and we call it a coincidence.” He said it casually enough that it took her a second to realize he wasn’t joking. “I’d rather not lie to you. Gets complicated fast, and I’m bad at it.”
“You’ve clearly never once had to try.”
“Never had a reason to.” His jaw shifted, there and gone before she could read it. “Until recently.”