8. Emma #2
They walked back through the park because the day was too good to waste on a cab, and three blocks in, Jace told her about the night Roman tried to cook dinner for the whole team and set off the fire suppression system so badly, Diesel spent a week finding soaked protein bars in places nobody could explain.
“Took out the entire kitchen. Over spaghetti.”
“How does a person burn spaghetti.”
“Roman finds a way. He always finds a way.” He was laughing—a full, unguarded sound she’d never heard out of him, and it rearranged his whole face, younger, looser, noticeably more dangerous to her composure than the scowl he usually wore.
“Diesel banned him from the stove for life. Roman still calls it a betrayal.”
“I like Diesel’s odds of holding that line.”
“Diesel’s held tougher lines than a man with a spatula.” He glanced over, still smiling, his face softening further at the sight of hers. “You’re smiling.”
“I’m allowed.”
“You don’t. Much. Not like this.”
“Making an exception.” She bumped his shoulder with hers, easy, natural in a way that would’ve read impossible not too long ago, back when he was a stranger who’d caught her in a ballroom and derailed her entire life without asking. “Don’t get used to it.”
“Too late.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. Didn’t look for one either. They walked the rest of the way in a quiet worth keeping, and Emma spent the whole distance trying to remember the last time a case had registered as the least important part of her day.
The map ate the whole corner of the house’s formal dining room, newly dubbed the “evidence room”—by midnight, property records overlaid on a printed city grid, pins marking every acquisition Tucker had traced.
She’d tried sending Jace to bed an hour ago.
He’d made it as far as the doorway, doubled back with coffee she hadn’t asked for, and planted himself on the couch instead—arms crossed, watching her work, a man clearly settling in for the night rather than leaving her alone with a case at two in the morning.
She hadn’t fought it very hard. She was starting to understand that fighting that instinct in him cost more energy than it saved.
Pin by pin, the picture built itself. She stopped seeing purchases and started seeing the negative space between them—the shape the untouched land made once she quit tracking what Kane bought and started tracking what he’d bought it around.
She stepped back to take in the whole board at once, and the pattern she’d been circling all day snapped into a shape she recognized.
A ring. Every purchase sat on the perimeter of paranormal infrastructure—two hospitals, a women’s shelter, three supply routes, a scattering of parcels that meant nothing alone and everything as a whole.
He hadn’t been buying scattered land. He’d been closing a circle, one purchase at a time, patient enough that nobody watching the money would ever think to check the map.
Her stomach dropped somewhere around three a.m., the moment the pattern finished assembling itself behind her eyes.
“This isn’t theft.” Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “It’s a siege.”
Jace was on his feet before she finished the sentence, crossing to stand beside her, tracing the pattern with his eyes the way she’d only moments ago traced it with her hands.
“He’s not stealing money. He’s buying a chokehold.
Cut the hospitals, the shelters, the routes, and it doesn’t matter who owns what anymore.
Nobody moves without going through him first.”
“That’s not a fraud case.”
“No. It isn’t.”
She was still staring at the map, phone half raised to call Gerri, when the alarm tore through the house.
Not a drill. Not the safe house’s usual quiet hum of cameras and sensors. A full breach alert, red and screaming, Tucker’s voice cutting through the intercom, all his usual humor burned clean off it.
“Wilder Hope archive. Someone’s inside. They’re taking hard copies.”
Emma was moving before she’d finished processing the words, taking the stairs two at a time behind Jace toward the basement command center, where Tucker already had a recovered feed pulled up, grainy, time-stamped twenty minutes back.
Two figures in dark clothing moved through the archive’s back hallway like they’d walked it a hundred times. A third waited by the door. Badge scanned. Keycard used. Someone with legitimate access who hadn’t needed to break anything to get in.
The camera caught his face for one clean second before he turned.
Emma’s stomach fell straight through the floor.
“Rewind it.” Her own voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. “Tucker, rewind it, right now.”
He did, without a word. The frame froze.
Emma’s whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature and everything to do with recognizing every line of that face—the reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, the tie he’d worn to every deposition she’d ever watched him give, the particular tilt of his head whenever he ran numbers he didn’t want anyone watching him run.
“That’s Walter.” The words barely made it out. “That’s Walter Pierce.”
Her mentor. The man who’d taught her to read a ledger for the lie hiding under the numbers.
The man who’d sat with her until midnight before her first deposition, running mock cross-examinations until she stopped shaking.
The man who’d shown up to her graduation with a bouquet of grocery-store carnations because he said real florists overcharged for sentiment, and she’d kept one pressed in a book for six years because nobody had ever done anything that small and that kind for her.
He’d taught her every trick a person used to hide inside a set of numbers.
He’d never once mentioned he could hide the same way inside a person’s trust, if she loved him enough not to check.
Her hands started shaking. She set the coffee mug down hard enough that it cracked against the counter, because holding it steady had stopped being possible.
“Emma.” Jace’s hand closed around her shoulder, firm, grounding, the only solid thing in a room that had tilted sideways without warning. “Look at me.”
She couldn’t. Not yet. She kept her eyes locked on the frozen frame, on the man who’d built half of who she’d become, waiting for it to resolve into a version that made sense.
It didn’t. It wasn’t going to.
“Run it again,” she said, and this time her voice came out stripped down to the bone, the sound of a woman nailing a lid shut before the thing underneath could get out and do more damage than it already had. “I want to see his face again.”
Tucker ran it again without being asked twice, quiet in a way that told her he understood exactly what this was costing her.
“He knows the building.” Her voice steadied, sentence by sentence, competence sliding back on like armor because it was the only thing left she had to wear.
“Archive layout. Retention schedule. Which files matter most. Whoever’s running this didn’t hire muscle.
They hired someone who already knew precisely what to steal, and they got him from somewhere close enough to me that it ought to terrify all of us. My mentor.”
“You didn’t see this coming.” Jace’s hand hadn’t moved off her shoulder.
“I was supposed to. That’s my entire job.”
“You trusted a man who spent years earning it. That’s not a failure. It’s what trust is built to do.” His grip tightened once, grounding rather than restraining. “We’re finding out why tonight if I have to take the city apart to do it. You’re not carrying this alone.”
Emma nodded, already reaching for her coat, spine straight.
Sitting still with this betrayal was no longer a position she could hold, and she intended to hear Walter’s reasons straight from his own mouth, tonight, before the shock had time to soften into anything gentler than he deserved.
Some ghosts got to stay comfortable. This one had lost that privilege the moment his face hit the screen.