10. Emma
TEN
EMMA
Breakfast was an ambush of an entirely different kind.
Emma made it as far as the coffee pot before Tucker glanced up from his laptop, took one look at her face, and went back to typing without comment—which landed worse than if he’d said anything at all.
Diesel set a plate in front of her without being asked, considered her a beat too long, and returned to his eggs without a word, opinion visibly withheld.
Roman, for once in his life, said absolutely nothing, which was the loudest reaction of all three.
“Somebody say something,” Emma muttered into her coffee. “I can’t handle the collective restraint.”
“I’m exercising professional discretion,” Roman said, immediately abandoning it. “Also, for the record, I called it in March. I have a whiteboard. There’s a whole timeline.”
“There isn’t a whiteboard.”
“There’s absolutely a whiteboard. Tucker laminated it.”
“I laminated it,” Tucker confirmed, without looking up.
Her phone buzzed. Nora, predictably.
!!!!!!!!!!!
That was the entire message. Emma laid the phone down and reached for the coffee instead.
It buzzed again thirty seconds later. Milo told me you two are official and I need every detail or I’m coming over there myself. I have a shift in four hours and I will still find time.
She didn’t dignify that with a response either, though the sheer speed of the intelligence leak told her exactly how much privacy she could expect for the rest of her natural life.
Jace came down ten minutes later, dressed, focused, already running the anonymous message through his head from the set of his jaw.
He crossed straight to the coffee pot, and to her, dropping a kiss against her temple on his way past, an ordinary gesture now, which—apparently—it was.
Nobody at the table so much as blinked, though Tucker’s typing hitched for exactly one beat too long to be casual.
“That’s disgusting,” Roman announced, delighted. “Never stop.”
“We need eyes on the meet before we walk in blind.” Jace dropped into the seat beside her, casual as any other morning, though his knee found hers under the table hard enough to make a point of it. “Tucker, trace the number?”
“Already tried. Burner, bought with cash, activated an hour before it texted Emma. Whoever sent it knows exactly how to stay invisible.” Tucker spun his monitor around, a city map already up, a single pin dropped in the financial district.
“Location’s a warehouse. No cameras in a two-block radius, which means our contact is careful, or the setup’s a trap. Possibly both.”
“Wonderful. I love a good possibly-both.” Emma stole a piece of toast off Roman’s plate, which he allowed with the wounded dignity of a man choosing his battles. “Do we at least know if it’s an occupied warehouse or one of the sad, abandoned ones with the aesthetic?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to my nerves. I’ve had much better luck in occupied buildings.”
Roman pointed his fork at her, the gesture of a man acknowledging a Supreme Court verdict. “This is why I like her.”
“I’ve already got Roman and Diesel running perimeter thirty minutes ahead of you,” Tucker went on, calm. “If it’s a trap, we’ll know before you’re inside it.”
Roman, mouth full of toast that was rapidly becoming Emma’s toast, offered his professional assessment without being asked.
“For the record, if it’s another warehouse, I want it noted that I’m getting genuinely offended.
Every single one smells the same. Machine oil and regret.
Criminals in this city apparently shop at exactly one store. ”
“That’s not helpful, Roman.”
“It’s not meant to be helpful. It’s meant to be true.” He aimed the fork at Jace next, laying down fact. “For the record, if we ever catch this guy, I want five minutes alone with his real estate agent.”
Milo appeared in the doorway, phone already out, thumbs moving with the focus of a man mid-conversation. “Nora wants to know if you’re doing okay. I told her I’d ask, but between us, I think she mostly wants me to describe your face right now for content purposes.”
“Tell her I’m fine.”
“She won’t believe that. Neither do I, honestly, but I’ll pass it along.” Milo’s thumbs kept moving, undeterred by the lack of enthusiasm in the room.
Jace’s jaw ticked once, watching the whole table circle her like she was made of glass instead of a woman who’d once made a federal auditor cry using nothing but a spreadsheet.
He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t have to.
He reached over and refilled her coffee without being asked, which from him counted as a small act of open warfare against anyone who thought she needed managing.
Emma caught his eye across the table, and a current passed between them, steadier than the case, older than last night, finally given room to breathe now that neither of them was pretending otherwise.
“We move in an hour,” Jace said, standing, and the kitchen shifted gears around him the way it always did.
He stopped behind her chair long enough to squeeze her shoulder on his way to grab his jacket, an absent, easy touch that had nothing tactical in it at all, and she caught herself leaning into it before she’d decided to.
The warehouse sat exactly where Tucker’s pin had promised, a converted storage facility gone quiet with disuse, bare concrete floors and ceilings high enough to swallow sound in ways that would make any ambush a lot harder to hear coming.
“Perimeter’s clean,” Roman’s voice crackled through the earpiece, low. “No vehicles, no lookouts, no sign of anyone but your girl. Doesn’t mean I like it.”
Jace’s hand found her hip as they crossed the loading dock, steering her wide of a stack of pallets that could’ve hidden anyone, his whole body angled between her and every blind corner without seeming to think about it. “Stay behind me until we’ve got eyes on this person.”
“I always stay behind you. I’m a model client.”
“You have never once stayed behind me.”
“I stayed behind you for a solid four seconds in the parking garage. It’s a start.”
Their contact was already waiting when Emma and Jace stepped through the side door—a woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty-six, hunched into an oversized coat, hands wrapped so tight around a laptop bag that her knuckles had gone pale.
“You’re Emma Burke.” A statement, not a request for confirmation.
The woman’s eyes flicked to Jace, cataloging him fast, the reflexive scan of someone who’d learned to check exits before she learned to trust rooms. “My name’s Nina.
I work—worked—two floors under Kane Strategic Holdings’ compliance office.
I found something I wasn’t supposed to find. ”
“Take your time,” Emma said, gentler than she meant to, because the girl’s hands hadn’t stopped shaking since they’d walked in.
“There isn’t time. That’s the whole problem.
” Nina unzipped the bag with fingers that fumbled twice before finding the drive inside.
“Kane’s not laundering charity money for profit.
He’s laundering it to buy land. I found the shell registrations six weeks ago.
I’ve been sitting on this because every time I think about going to the police, I remember his security detail moves like it’s ex-military, and I get a lot less brave. ”
“You came to us instead.”
“I came to you because you’re the only person who’s gotten close enough to scare him.
That’s not nothing.” Nina’s laugh came out thin, more nerves than humor.
“I used to read about you. The corporate fraud thing, months back. My roommate thought it was cool. I thought you were terrifying, in a good way. The kind of terrifying that catches people who deserve it.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was meant as one.” Nina held the drive out, hand still shaking. “This has everything. Every shell company, every property acquisition, every—”
The side door blew inward.
Four men in tactical gear came through the breach fast and coordinated, and Emma’s whole body went cold with recognition before her brain finished registering what she was looking at—the same disciplined, wordless efficiency from the parking garage, the same total absence of hesitation that meant these weren’t opportunists.
“Down!” Jace’s voice cut through the warehouse’s cavernous acoustics, already moving, already between Emma and the nearest line of fire before she’d finished registering the order, a raw, animal sound tearing loose from somewhere underneath a decade of training.
She grabbed Nina by the coat sleeve and hauled her behind a support column as the first shots cracked off the concrete, sound bouncing wrong in the open space, impossible to tell which direction anything came from.
Dust kicked up where a round chewed into the pillar six inches from her head.
Somewhere behind them, Diesel’s low voice counted targets over comms, calm and even, a man doing math in the middle of chaos because someone had to.
Roman’s voice crackled through Jace’s earpiece, tight and fast, already converging on the building from the perimeter. “Two more coming through the loading dock. We’re closing the gap, boss, thirty seconds.”
“Don’t have thirty seconds.” Every ounce of Jace had narrowed down to a single objective, all warmth gone out of him at once, and the look on his face when he put the second attacker down wasn’t tactical anymore—it was personal.
“Go left,” he said to her, low, urgent, meeting her eyes for half a second that carried an entire conversation’s worth of trust in it.
“Service exit, two hundred feet, the one we mapped this morning. I’ll cover you. ”
She didn’t argue. She didn’t freeze. She grabbed Nina’s arm and ran the route they’d walked through on Tucker’s floor plan at six that morning, mapped for exactly this contingency, and some small, distant part of her recognized that the woman she’d been a month ago would have frozen solid at the first gunshot instead of moving like she’d rehearsed this a hundred times.