12. Emma
TWELVE
EMMA
The call came in at two in the morning, and Emma was pulling on her boots before Jace finished relaying the address.
“Riverside campus. Smoke from the storage buildings, spreading fast.” He was already moving, jacket half on, the controlled calm in his voice meaning he’d locked every other feeling behind it for later. “Gerri’s on-site. Roman and Diesel are rolling.”
“I’m coming.”
“Emma—”
“I know which cabinet matters.” She grabbed her bag off the hook by the door before he’d finished building the argument he clearly thought would work. “Nobody else on your team can read that archive room the way I can. You need me there.”
He looked at her for exactly one second, weighing it, and the look on her face made the argument die before it started. “Stay behind me until I clear the building.”
“Deal.”
He caught her wrist on the way out the door and pressed a hard kiss to her mouth that had nothing gentle in it at all—the kind of kiss a man gave someone he fully intended to keep breathing by the end of the night, whether she liked the plan or not.
“That was for luck,” he said, moving again before she could answer.
“Since when do you believe in luck?”
“Since you.” He didn’t slow down to explain further.
They made the drive in eleven minutes that dragged like sixty, orange light staining the sky ahead of them long before the campus came into view, and by the time they pulled up to the gates the whole night had gone thick with smoke and sirens and the chaos of people running toward danger instead of away from it.
Emma’s phone buzzed twice in the car—Nora, then Milo—both messages some variation of are you safe, both left unanswered, because there wasn’t anything safe left to promise yet.
The scene that greeted them was no ordinary emergency. It was the opening minutes of an outright war.
Volunteers streamed out of the main dormitory in a steady, practiced line, herding children in pajamas and elderly residents in wheelchairs toward the buses idling on the front lawn.
A woman Emma recognized from the clinic wing carried two terrified rabbits against her chest, cradled with a mother’s exact grip.
Smoke rolled thick and black from the storage buildings at the property’s eastern edge, close enough to the archive wing that Emma’s stomach dropped the second she saw it.
A teenage boy sprinted past clutching a fire extinguisher twice his size, and Jace caught his shoulder without breaking stride, redirecting him toward the buses with a firm hand and three words that carried more authority than a shout would have. “Not your job.”
“Somebody has to—”
“Somebody is. It’s not you.” Jace didn’t wait to see the boy comply, moving on, trusting the command to land the way his commands always landed.
Emma peeled off toward a cluster of volunteers arguing over which building to check next, adrenaline making them slow instead of fast. “You three, dormitory wing, make sure the count matches the roster. You two, stay with the buses and keep the kids calm, that matters more right now than anything else. Nobody goes near the storage buildings without a Maddox jacket on, are we clear?”
They scattered at her voice, triage instincts on full display from a woman who’d spent her career running spreadsheets instead, and for one strange, adrenaline-bright second, Emma understood exactly why Jace never hesitated handing her a plan to run.
“That’s not an accidental fire.” Jace was scanning the tree line, body gone tight and coiled, nostrils flaring once, scenting the wind for the threat hiding underneath the smoke. “Accidental fires don’t start in three buildings at once.”
“Kane’s done pretending.” Emma was already moving toward the volunteer coordinator directing traffic near the buses. “Where’s Gerri?”
“In the pharmacy. She went back in for serums the kids need to survive.” The woman’s voice cracked with exhaustion and fear in equal measure. “I told her not to. She didn’t listen.”
“Of course she didn’t.” Emma ran, and Jace fell into step beside her without argument, steering her by the elbow clear of a wheelchair ramp overloaded with panicked residents.
Two men in dark tactical gear dropped out of the smoke near the service entrance before they’d covered half the distance to the records wing, moving with the same brutal, coordinated precision Kane’s people always brought to an ambush.
Smoke rolled between them thick enough to swallow half the fight from view, and Jace used it—closing on the first man before he’d fully cleared the haze and putting him down with a single hard strike before the man got a real look at what hit him.
He didn’t wait to watch him drop, already pivoting into the second attacker’s swing with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for someone his size.
He took a glancing hit across the jaw that would have staggered most men and used the momentum instead, driving his shoulder into the attacker’s chest and slamming him back into the brick wall hard enough to crack the mortar.
The second man didn’t stay down. He came up swinging a collapsible baton, catching Jace across the ribs with a crack that was supposed to fold him, and for one heart-stopping second Emma’s whole body locked with the urge to move, to help, to do anything other than stand there useless in the smoke.
Jace didn’t so much as flinch. He caught the next swing bare-handed, twisted the baton free, and used the man’s own momentum to put him face-first into the pavement with a finality that ended the fight in the same breath it started.
“Stay behind me,” he said, not even breathing hard, blood welling from a split knuckle he didn’t seem to notice, and Emma realized she’d frozen exactly two steps closer than he wanted her.
“I am behind you.”
“You’re beside me.” He didn’t look away from the two unconscious men, chest heaving now that the adrenaline had room to catch up with him, and reached back without looking to find her hand, checking her over with one fast, thorough glance before urgency won out over everything else.
“You say behind me, assuming I have any real intention of staying there.”
“I say it because it’s true, and I refuse to stop trying regardless.” He caught her hand and pulled her forward, past the two unconscious mercenaries, urgency written back into every line of him now that the immediate threat had dropped. “Roman, status.”
“East service road’s clean. Two more down, Diesel’s got a third pinned.” Roman’s voice crackled through the earpiece, breathless. “Fourth one bolted for the tree line, I lost him in the smoke. I hate this property. I want that formally noted somewhere, in ink, with my signature on it.”
“Noted.” Jace didn’t break stride. “These aren’t local muscle. Same discipline as the garage crew. Somebody’s paying premium rates for tonight’s work.”
“Two rescued kittens,” Diesel added, utterly unprompted, over the same channel. “Found them in the storage building. Didn’t have anywhere else to put them.”
“That’s not appropriate combat gear, Diesel.”
“They’re very calm kittens.” His grip on the mercenary he was restraining didn’t loosen an inch. “Nobody’s allowed to comment further.”
Tucker’s voice cut through next, breathless, furious.
“The attackers went straight for the accounting office before anyone lit the storage buildings. No hesitation, no searching. Whoever briefed them knew the floor plan cold. That’s not intel Kane bought off a satellite map.
It’s intel from somebody who’s walked those halls. ”
“Somebody close.” Emma’s stomach turned over. “Somebody Gerri trusts.”
“We’ll deal with that after the fire’s out.” Jace’s hand found hers, brief, hard, grounding. “Archive building. Now.”
The records wing had gone thick with smoke by the time they reached it, visibility dropping to a few feet, the air gone hot and wrong in a way that made every breath feel borrowed.
Emma pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth and pushed forward anyway, counting doorways from memory because the signage had already vanished into gray haze.
Overhead, the ceiling groaned—wood and old plaster complaining under heat it was never built to survive, a sound that raised the hair on Emma’s arms even through the panic already crowding her chest.
“That’s the roof talking.” Jace’s grip tightened at her shoulder, his whole body angled protectively around hers even mid-stride. “We move fast, or we don’t move at all.”
“Third door on the left. There’s a cabinet behind the false wall panel.
” She was moving before she finished the sentence, Jace one step behind her, one hand braced against her shoulder to keep her oriented in the smoke.
“Gerri had it installed after a break-in scare years ago. Nobody outside the board knows it exists.”
“You know it exists.”
“I read this building’s entire financial history for the fraud case. Buildings talk, if you know how to listen.” She found the panel by feel, fingers scraping along the wall until the seam gave under her palm, and behind it sat the safe exactly where memory promised it would be.
The lock gave on the third try. Inside sat two decades of original land deeds and trust documents Kane’s people believed had already burned.
“Got it.” Emma pulled the files free, clutching them against her chest, and turned to find Jace moving toward her, urgency written across every line of him, eyes locked on the ceiling above her head, gone from bad to immediate in the space of one heartbeat.
“Down—”
The ceiling gave.