6. Emma
SIX
EMMA
Emma woke up furious, which was becoming a bit of a pattern.
Her wrist ached under its brace. The cut on her cheekbone pulled every time she frowned, and she was frowning a lot this morning, mostly at the ceiling.
She’d slept in a strange bed in a stranger’s fortress surrounded by armed men who’d apparently adopted her overnight, and the first sound she heard on waking was a chair scraping outside her door.
She yanked it open, ready for round two of last night’s argument, and found her own door had been custom-decorated.
FUTURE ALPHA SUITE. Block capitals. Permanent marker. Dead center.
“Diesel.”
Diesel—apparently her hallway’s assigned guard—looked up from his coffee with an expression of total, wounded innocence. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“You’re sitting six inches from it.”
“Coincidence.”
She left it for later interrogation and stalked off toward the kitchen instead, because a man had posted armed muscle outside her bedroom without asking, and she had opinions ranked by severity and ready to deploy.
Jace was there, dressed, alert, every line of him wide awake and daring anyone to suggest otherwise. His eyes went to her cheek first, then her wrist, something flickering behind them before he shut it down.
“You posted a guard outside my door.”
“I posted a guard outside your door.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“He’s not a babysitter. He’s a deterrent.” Jace kept pouring his coffee without breaking stride, which annoyed her far more than if he’d fought back properly. “Test the theory. I’ll pull him. See how that goes.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“The point is I didn’t agree to this.” She swept a hand at the kitchen, the hallway, the entire fact of waking up inside a stranger’s compound. “I agreed to a tracker and a couple of terms. Nobody mentioned round-the-clock surveillance of my bedroom door.”
“Your bedroom door is the only thing between you and anyone who gets past the perimeter, the cameras, and me. I’m not gambling with the last line.
” He finally looked at her properly, and a flash of dark crossed his face at the sight of her bruised cheek—there and gone, replaced by the careful blank he used when choosing words mattered more than usual.
“Fewer guards once that bruising fades and you’re back to full strength. ”
“That’s emotional blackmail.”
“It’s incentive.” He set a second mug in front of her without asking, a fairly transparent apology in mug form. “The guard’s not there because I don’t trust you to handle yourself. He’s there because I don’t trust anyone else in this city right now. Different thing.”
“That almost qualified as an apology.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Close enough. I’ll take it.” She wrapped both hands around the mug, brace and all, and studied him over the rim. “You look terrible. Did you sleep?”
“Some.”
“Define some.”
“Enough to function.” He turned back to the stove before she could push, and the way he avoided her eyes was answer enough.
Breakfast was an argument in progress.
“You fold the batter, Roman. You don’t beat it as though it personally insulted your mother.”
“I’m building volume.”
“You’re building concrete.” Diesel confiscated the bowl with calm, immovable authority—he’d won this exact fight before and intended to win it permanently this time. “Sit. Watch a professional.”
Roman sat, wounded, and immediately redirected at Emma with the open curiosity of a large dog meeting somebody new. “How’s the arm?”
“Sprained. I’ll live.”
“Unrelated—started a second betting pool. Want the odds on Jace losing his mind before you two make it down the aisle for real?”
“There’s no aisle. This is fake.”
“Sure it is.” Roman didn’t sound remotely convinced, and went back to supervising Diesel’s pancakes, the matter apparently settled in his own private court.
Tucker drifted in, laptop open, and dropped it on the counter without looking up. “Morning. I need your signature on three NDAs and your blood type, in that order of urgency.”
“My blood type isn’t urgent.”
“It is if you get shot again.”
“I didn’t get shot. I got shoved into a pillar.”
“Give it time,” Tucker said, far too cheerfully, and kept typing.
Milo arrived last, one glance at her wrist brace enough to produce a small chart with the flourish of a man presenting evidence in court. “Pain scale. One to ten. Don’t lie, I’ve heard every lie a patient can tell and yours won’t be original.”
“Four.”
“Liar. Six. Adjusting your meds.”
The doorbell saved her from arguing. Diesel—flipping a pancake one-handed—called out, “That’ll be Gerri,” matter-of-fact and certain. He’d stopped questioning how Gerri Wilder knew things years ago.
It was a delivery driver holding a box addressed, in looping cursive, to The Happy Couple, Care of the Nice Brownstone. No street number. No apartment. Only the phrase—and it had found the correct door anyway.
“How does she do that?”
“Nobody knows.” Roman took the box, already tearing in. “Stopped asking around year two. Better for everyone’s sanity.”
Croissants, still warm, a note tucked on top in the same looping hand: Eat well. You both look tired. Sapphires or diamonds? Answer by Thursday, or I choose for you, and you won’t like what I choose.
“We are not picking rings,” Emma announced to a room that had already moved on to the croissants without her.
Her phone rang before she’d finished the sentence. Gerri, predictably.
“Darling, quick question, unrelated to the jewelry.” No greeting. Gerri never bothered with one. “The Hendricks Family Trust. Ring any bells?”
Emma set down her croissant. “Am I supposed to recognize that name?”
“It’s one of mine. Small, quiet, funds a scholarship program nobody’s touched in three years, which is exactly the kind of charity a person hides money inside if they wanted it to stay hidden.
I only remembered it exists because my accountant mentioned the paperwork looked odd, and then I remembered I fired that accountant two years ago for incompetence, and then I thought—well.
” She let the silence do the rest, far too pleased with herself. “You’ll want to look at it.”
“Gerri, why do you have an accountant you fired still filing your paperwork?”
“I didn’t say I stopped receiving his emails. I said I fired him. Two different things.” Gerri didn’t miss a beat. “Also, still waiting on the ring answer. Thursday, darling. The clock is not slowing down for your feelings about it.”
She hung up before Emma could respond, which had stopped being surprising sometime around day two of knowing her.
“New lead,” Emma announced to the table, already reaching for a pen. “The Hendricks Family Trust. Tucker, can you—”
“Got it here,” Tucker said, not looking up, fingers flying across the keys.
Nora arrived at noon, unannounced, and unsurprised to find an armed compound waiting for her instead of Emma’s apartment.
“Okay.” She planted herself in the doorway, scrubs still on from a shift she hadn’t bothered changing out of, and swept the kitchen once—Roman mid-argument with Diesel about syrup ratios, Tucker typing, Milo taking someone’s blood pressure for no medical reason whatsoever.
Her eyes landed on Emma’s bandaged wrist, her cheek, then swept the room a second time before locking, finally and pointedly, on the very large man currently pouring Emma a second coffee without being asked.
“I have several questions. None of them are about the fraud.”
“Nora—”
“Your texts have been unhinged for a week and a half now. I assumed embezzlement stress.” She gestured at the assembled team, the tactical gear draped over a chair, the entire fortress-that-also-serves-pancakes atmosphere of the place.
“This is not embezzlement stress. This is a man who looks at you like you personally hung the moon, and I want the timeline. In order. Starting with why nobody told me you got engaged.”
“It’s fake.”
Milo, without looking up from his chart: “It’s extremely not fake.”
“Thank you.” Nora pointed at him, triumphant, a woman whose star witness had testified in her favor. “He gets it.”
That was apparently all it took. Nora and Milo fell into conversation in under four minutes, trading stories with the gleeful horror of two people whose jobs both involved someone else’s worst day and had developed matching senses of humor about it.
“Gunshot wound,” Nora said, flat and final, like the argument had already been settled and she saw no reason to relitigate it. “Better arc. Buildup, crisis, resolution. A severed finger’s a fact you deliver, then everyone stares at you.”
“Depends whose finger. Context is everything.”
“Context isn’t everything, Milo. Some stories are objectively better.”
“Had a finger walk itself into my ER in a lunch cooler once. Beat that.”
Nora considered this with genuine respect. “I concede.”
Emma caught Jace watching the whole scene from the doorway, one corner of his mouth pulling up, and warmth settled in her chest, and it wasn’t the coffee.
He caught her watching him right back, and neither of them looked away—until Nora’s voice cut clean through the moment, timed as if she’d been waiting all morning for exactly this.
“You two are doing it again. The eye thing. Four times since I walked in.”
“There’s no eye thing.”
“There’s absolutely an eye thing, and I give this fake engagement four days, tops, before it stops being fake.” Nora pointed her mug at Roman, calling her shot the way a woman calls a pool table. “I’d put money on it if I had any money left after student loans.”
“I’ve got a pool going,” Roman said, delighted, already reaching for his phone. “Second pool. Competing pool. I love this so much.”
“I want in.”
“Absolutely not,” Emma said, to a table that had, predictably, stopped listening to her three sentences ago.
The command center had settled into the particular hush that only showed up when everyone in it was genuinely working.