10. Emma #2
Behind her, Jace was laying down cover fire in short, controlled bursts, human-form and tactical, no wolf in it yet, only a man who’d done this before and intended to keep doing it until everyone on his side was breathing.
A round sparked off a metal support two feet from Emma’s shoulder.
She didn’t slow down. Slowing got people killed, and she had a twenty-six-year-old’s entire future clutched in her free hand.
They almost made it.
The fifth attacker came from an angle nobody had mapped, materializing out of a stack of shipping crates with a gun already leveled, and Nina—half a step behind Emma, close enough to see it coming—shoved Emma sideways with both hands and took the shot meant for Emma’s back.
The sound she made going down was small. Almost polite. Nothing close to what Emma expected a person dying to sound like.
“No—” Emma caught her before she hit the ground, knees cracking against concrete, both hands already pressing hard against the wound in a hopeless, automatic instinct to stop what couldn’t be stopped.
Somewhere behind her, Jace’s voice tore loose in a sound closer to a roar than a word, and the crack of a single shot meant the fifth attacker wasn’t getting up again either.
“Drive.” Nina’s voice had gone thin, her hand finding Emma’s wrist with a grip that had nothing left in it but will. “Take it. It’s already yours—I needed you to have all of it.”
“Stay with me. Help’s coming, stay with me—”
“Follow the property deeds.” Blood seeped at the corner of her mouth, her breathing gone wet and uneven. “Not the money. The money’s a distraction. He wants the land. Follow the deeds and you’ll find—”
She didn’t finish. Emma held her through the last of it, some furious, useless part of her still trying to keep a promise the girl would never hear kept.
Jace found her there four minutes later, the warehouse gone quiet except for Roman zip-tying the last conscious attacker with far more force than the job required and Diesel’s low, steady voice on comms calling for backup that had arrived too late to matter for the one person it needed to save.
Emma sat on the cold concrete with Nina’s head in her lap and the drive clutched so tight in one fist, her knuckles had gone white, and when Jace crouched in front of her, gently prying her fingers open one at a time to check she hadn’t cut herself on her own grip, she let him.
“She saved my life,” Emma said, and her voice came out steadier than she expected, steadier than she had any right to feel. “She was twenty-six and terrified and she still stepped in front of a bullet for a stranger.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to waste that.” Emma finally looked up, dry-eyed in a way that registered as more dangerous than crying would have. “Every piece of what’s on this drive gets used. She doesn’t get to die for nothing.”
“She won’t.” Jace’s hand closed over hers, steady, grounding, and for once, he didn’t try to talk her out of the fury under the grief. “I’ve got you. Both things are true right now. Let’s use them.”
He helped her up, and for a moment, neither of them moved toward the door, the warehouse settling into the particular silence that only comes after violence has finished asking its questions.
“You ran the plan without hesitating,” he said, quiet, like it had been sitting in his chest since the moment she’d bolted left instead of freezing.
“Two weeks ago you’d have frozen. Tonight, you ran a route we’d mapped and got her most of the way to safety.
I need you to know what that meant to me.
Trusting the plan. Trusting me enough to run it without checking twice. ”
“I didn’t have time to check twice.”
“You had exactly enough time to check twice. You didn’t.” His thumb moved once over her knuckles, absent, needing the contact more than he needed to make the point. “That’s not nothing. Not to me.”
Emma looked at him for a long moment, the knot in her chest loosening even with Nina’s blood still drying on her hands.
“For the first time in years, I didn’t feel alone.
Not once. Even with everything going wrong, I knew exactly where you were and exactly what you’d do if I needed you.
” Her voice wavered, the first real crack since the shooting started.
“That terrifies me more than the mercenaries did.”
“Why?”
“Because it means I have something to lose now. A month ago the worst thing that could happen to me was losing a case. Now the worst thing that could happen to me is losing you, and that’s a different category of fear, and I don’t know what to do with it.
” She wiped at her eyes with the back of one wrist, annoyed at herself for the tears finally showing up.
“I don’t scare easily. I scare easily now. ”
“Good.” He pulled her in, chin resting against her hair, arms banded around her tight enough that the fury still running underneath his calm came through anyway, a low current he hadn’t fully leashed yet. “Because I’ve been terrified of exactly that since the ballroom, and misery loves company.”
She laughed, wet and unexpected, into his shoulder. “That’s a terrible thing to say to someone who’s crying.”
“If anyone comes after you again,” Jace said, quieter, all the warmth gone out of his voice and replaced by a chill that ran far deeper, “there won’t be a corner of this city that hides them from me.”
“I believe you.”
“Good. Hold onto it.”
The basement command center hummed with the energy of a team that had a real lead and wasn’t about to waste it.
Tucker had the drive running through two separate decryption passes before Emma had finished washing the blood off her hands, and by the time she made it back to the lower level, he already had a file structure blooming open across several monitors.
Milo’s phone buzzed somewhere behind her, and his voice carried across the room before she could tune it out.
“Nora wants to know if surviving gunfire with your fiancé counts as a second date. Her words, not mine. I’m relaying it because I told her I would, not because I have an opinion on the matter. ”
“Tell her I’d rather not grade dates by body count.”
“I’ll paraphrase.” Milo’s thumbs kept going. “She’s going to be furious she missed this. She’s been asking to shadow a real op.”
“No,” Jace and Emma said, at nearly the same moment, and neither of them found that as funny as Roman clearly did.
“I’m calling it DefinitelyNotEvidence.zip,” Tucker said, without looking up, “because if anyone ever subpoenas my naming conventions, I want plausible deniability.”
“That’s not how plausible deniability works.”
“It’s how mine works.” He spun one monitor toward her. “Forty-one shell companies. Every single one traces back through two or three shells to the same umbrella entity.”
Emma leaned in, scanning names she half-recognized from months of cross-referencing, watching them collapse one by one into a single point of origin on Tucker’s screen.
“Kane Strategic Holdings.” She said it flat, the whole conspiracy finally sitting undeniably in front of her. “It was never charities skimming each other. It was always only him.”
“Him, and whoever’s funding him at a level even I can’t trace yet.” Tucker’s jaw tightened, the closest he came to visibly rattled. “There’s a name buried three shells deep that keeps recurring. No face. No public record. Only a title.”
“What title?”
“The Chairman.” Tucker let that sit a moment before scrolling on, because none of them had anything useful to say about a threat they couldn’t yet fully picture.
Emma kept scrolling, half her attention on the files, half of it still four hours behind her in a warehouse that smelled like machine oil and blood, and near the bottom of the folder structure a document caught her eye that made her stomach drop clean through the floor.
A list. Acquisition targets, scheduled and dated, properties Kane intended to close on within the month.
Third from the top: the Wilder Hope Foundation’s largest satellite campus, the one that ran three shelters and a children’s clinic, the one Gerri Wilder had built with forty years of her own money and every ounce of the fight left in her.
“Jace.” Emma’s voice had gone very quiet. “He’s coming for Gerri next.”
The room went still. Tucker stopped typing. Roman, who’d been leaning against the doorframe with the last of his adrenaline still working its way out of his shoulders, straightened up, the humor wiped clean off his face at once.
“Timeline,” Jace said, crossing to look over her shoulder, voice gone flat and lethal the way it always did the moment a threat stopped being theoretical.
“Three weeks.” Emma tapped the date twice, hoping repetition might change it. “He’s going to take the one place in this city that has genuinely kept people safe, and he’s going to do it with paperwork instead of bullets, and nobody’s going to see it coming until the deed’s already signed.”
Emma stared at the file a moment longer, at Nina’s name nowhere on it and her fingerprints all over the fact that it existed at all, and closed the laptop with hands that had finally, mercifully, stopped shaking.