8. Emma
EIGHT
EMMA
The photographs from Kane’s donor records room covered the whole east wall now, and none of it added up the way theft was supposed to.
“Look at the transfer amounts.” Emma tapped three entries in a row, frowning at numbers that refused to behave. “Ordinary skimming runs on percentages. Round numbers. A ratio that scales with each charity’s endowment. This doesn’t scale with anything.”
“It scales with a pattern.” Tucker spun his monitor around, color-coded columns glowing. “Every transfer lines up with a property acquisition inside thirty days. Not a coincidence.”
“So he’s not stealing to get rich.” Emma stared at the wall, pieces rearranging into a shape she didn’t like yet. “He’s stealing to buy one exact thing.”
“Land?” Jace stayed bent over the map, tracking a pattern he’d already half-solved before she’d finished the question, jaw doing the thing it did when a puzzle turned into a threat. “For what?”
“Give me a real map and an hour, and I’ll tell you.” Emma pulled her legal pad closer, already sketching, connecting dots she couldn’t fully see yet but could already feel adding up.
Tucker cracked his knuckles, pulling up a fresh window. “I’ll start pulling zoning records. If he’s building a perimeter, the permit filings will show it too.”
“Good instinct.”
“I’ve got several. Nobody listens to most of them.”
Roman wandered in with a bag of bread rolls, eyed the wall for two seconds, and delivered his verdict unasked. “This investigation needs garlic bread. Every good breakthrough happens over garlic bread. It’s science.”
“That’s not science.”
“It’s my science.” He dropped a roll next to Tucker’s keyboard, ignoring the lack of consensus completely, and wandered off humming a tune that sounded suspiciously victorious.
Emma looked at Jace. Jace looked back, resigned. He’d stopped fighting Roman’s logic years ago and learned to route around it instead.
“I’ve got a contact who might know which firm’s brokering these deals.” She grabbed her coat off the chair. “Financial guy. Won’t talk on the phone.”
“Then we go see him.”
“It’s lunch. Public place.”
“Good. Easier to watch.” Jace was moving, no debate, no delay, only motion, and the speed of it lit a warmth in her stomach that had nothing at all to do with lunch.
He caught her elbow at the door, already scanning the street through the window before either of them had stepped outside. Some men checked their phones walking into a room. Jace checked exits. She was starting to find that highly attractive.
The restaurant sat two blocks off Fifth, small and loud and crowded enough that nobody at the surrounding tables could eavesdrop even if they tried, which was the entire point.
Her contact—a nervous man named Weller who’d spent fifteen years auditing hedge funds and visibly aged double that—showed up twelve minutes late, ordered nothing, confirmed the brokerage name in a voice pitched barely above the room noise, and left before the bread basket arrived.
“Efficient,” Emma said, watching him go, already cross-referencing the name in her head.
“Terrified.” Jace didn’t look bothered, scanning the room out of habit though the meeting was over. “A man that scared doesn’t hand over a name unless the alternative terrifies him worse.”
“Welcome to my job. Everyone’s scared of a thing. I get paid to find out what.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“It works.” Fast, automatic, and she caught him noticing the gap between what she’d said and what she meant.
Neither of them got up to leave.
A waiter arrived instead, unasked, carrying white roses neither of them had ordered. The card needed no signature: To the Adorable Fiancés. Eat a vegetable. I worry. Also, sapphires. I’ve decided for you.
Emma dropped her head into one hand. “How does she always know where we are?”
“I stopped asking months before you existed to her.” Jace read the card twice, a reluctant fondness tugging at his mouth. “It’s better for my blood pressure.”
Emma’s phone buzzed on cue, summoned by nothing more than bad posture. Don’t slouch, darling, it reads as guilty. Also I’ve already told the caterer sapphires. You’re welcome.—G
“She’s going to be unbearable at the wedding.”
“There’s no wedding.” Emma typed back there is no wedding, Gerri and got a single reply—a photograph of a sapphire ring, no caption, no further comment necessary.
She turned the phone facedown on the table and refused to look at it again.
“Reality has never once slowed Gerri Wilder down. Why start now?”
The waiter refilled their wine, and somewhere between the bread basket and an entrée neither of them ordered with any urgency, the conversation drifted well clear of the case entirely.
“Tell me one true thing.” Jace said it low, echoing the gala, except there was no ballroom full of donors to perform for this time. “Not the professional answer.”
“About what?”
“The thing you’re avoiding. You’ve got a list. I’ve watched you not-say things several times.”
Emma turned her wine glass by the stem, buying a second she didn’t need. “I was engaged. Before any of this.”
“I know. You mentioned the ex.”
“I mentioned the lesson. Not the story.” She kept her eyes on the glass, which made it easier.
“He was brilliant. Ambitious. The kind of brilliant that needs an audience, and for a while, I was a very good one. Then I started getting recognition he didn’t, and it turned out he never wanted an equal.
He wanted a mirror that made him look taller. ”
“Not your fault.”
“I know that now. Took me a while to believe it.” She looked up, and her voice thinned out at the edges despite her best effort to keep it level.
“The second I stopped being useful to his ego, I became the villain instead. Cold. Difficult. Married to my job. Every word men use for a woman who won’t shrink so he can feel bigger standing next to her. ”
“You’re not any of those things.”
“I know that too. Doesn’t mean it didn’t leave a mark.
” Her hands had gone still around the stem of her glass, knuckles pale.
“After him, I stopped trying to be loved and started making sure I was needed instead. Needed was survivable. Nobody walks out on the person solving their problem. They only leave once you stop being useful enough to keep around.”
Something in Jace settled into a stillness she was starting to recognize—not tension, she’d learned, but a man listening with his whole body instead of only his ears. “That’s a hell of a lonely way to build a life.”
“It’s efficient.” Thin smile, aiming for light, landing somewhere closer to raw. “Everyone’s got a list.”
He didn’t let her hide behind the joke this time.
Reached across the table and closed his hand over hers before she’d finished the sentence, thumb pressed hard against her knuckles like he could physically keep the rest of it from falling apart.
“You’re not hard to love. You’re hard to fool.
Whoever told you those were the same thing was lying to cover for himself. ”
Her chest split open, fast and unexpected, and she had to look down at the tablecloth to keep it off her face. Her eyes stung, which hadn’t happened over this ghost in longer than she wanted to admit.
“Does anyone else know? The real version, not the deposition version.”
“My sister does. Claire.” A small, unguarded smile crossed her face, there and gone.
“She’s the only one who ever got the honest account—she still calls if I go quiet too long, which is often, because I’m terrible about calling back.
She doesn’t know exactly what I do most days, or who I do it for.
Easier that way. She worries enough about me as it is. ”
“I’d like to meet her sometime.”
“You say that now.” She turned her wine glass a quarter turn, considering it. “She’d like you. She’s always been a better judge of people than I am. It’s deeply annoying, growing up with that. Your turn,” she managed, once she trusted her voice again. “Tell me the thing you don’t say out loud.”
Jace turned his glass, slow, and for a second, she thought he’d deflect the way he deflected everything that wasn’t tactical.
He didn’t.
“Before Maddox Tactical, I ran a unit overseas. Good men. Good unit.” His voice dropped into the register she’d only heard once before, in a parking garage, right before things went very wrong. “Job went bad in ways nobody planned for. I got most of my people home.”
He stopped. She didn’t fill the silence—she’d learned enough about this man to know an easy exit would only let him take it.
“Not all of them,” he said, finally, jaw cracking wide open along with the words.
“I told myself I’d see it coming next time.
Every threat. Every angle. Every way a good plan turns into a body count I have to carry alone.
That’s why I don’t do halfway with people I’m responsible for.
It was never about control. It’s about never again standing over someone I couldn’t get home. ”
“That’s not overbearing.” She turned her hand under his, laced their fingers, held on. “It’s the opposite of what I thought it was.”
“Doesn’t make it easier to live inside.”
“No.” She didn’t let go. “But it makes it make sense.”
They sat like that until the waiter came back a third time, visibly confused, to ask if they still wanted dessert.
They did. Jace ordered tiramisu without an ounce of self-consciousness, and Emma stared at him like he’d confessed to a felony.
“You. Tiramisu.”
“It’s good.”
“You drink black coffee out of spite and eat plain chicken for every meal. This doesn’t fit the brand.”
“I contain layers. Like an onion.”
She stole a bite before he could stop her, and the look he gave her—scandalized, fond, far too warm—landed complicated and warm in her chest. The espresso had nothing on it.