15. Emma
FIFTEEN
EMMA
The Catskills opened up past the tree line, the city falling away completely behind them, and Emma pressed her palm flat against the car window without quite meaning to.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s home.” Jace’s hand found hers over the console, thumb tracing slow circles against her knuckles as the compound came into view—timber and stone rising out of the forest like it had grown there instead of being built, communication towers discreet among the pines, a security perimeter she only recognized because he’d spent a week teaching her what to look for.
“Kane’s had his eye on the parcel bordering the eastern boundary for years.
Walter’s map confirms it. I needed you to see the ground before you saw it as a threat on a spreadsheet. ”
“You needed backup, you mean.”
“I needed you.” He said it simply, without performance, and the honesty of it sent a warm, unsteady jolt through her chest that she still hadn’t gotten used to. “Both things can be true. Also you’re better with a map than my entire senior staff combined, and I refuse to apologize for using that.”
“Flattery. I see what you’re doing.”
“Is it working?”
“Obviously.” She squeezed his hand, grinning despite herself.
The compound gates opened before they’d fully stopped, and a small crowd had already gathered on the porch of the largest lodge by the time Jace parked—pack members young and old, a scattering of children weaving between adult legs, all of them turning toward the car with open, unguarded interest that made Emma’s stomach flip.
“They’re not going to bite,” Jace said, low, amused, catching her hesitation.
“Says the man who occasionally does.”
“Only when provoked. You’ve been warned.
” He came around to open her door, and the hand he offered wasn’t a courtesy—it was an anchor, steady and certain, and she took it without thinking twice, letting him pull her out of the car and directly into the curve of his arm, the most natural transition in the world by now.
An older woman broke from the group first, silver-streaked hair pulled back, moving with the kind of easy, settled authority that told Emma exactly who ran this corner of the world when Jace wasn’t around.
“So you’re Emma.” She studied her for one long, assessing moment, then broke into a smile that transformed her whole face. “I’m Marjorie. I practically raised half this pack, including the very large, very stubborn man currently gripping your hand as though you might evaporate. Welcome home.”
“She’s not my mother,” Jace said, low, amused, catching Emma’s eye behind Marjorie’s shoulder. “She only likes people thinking she is.”
“I basically am.” Marjorie didn’t so much as glance back. “Your actual mother will be along by dinner, and she’s considerably less forgiving than I am, so enjoy the easy version first.”
“I’m not—” Emma started, then stopped, because home had landed somewhere she hadn’t braced for it.
“You are, though.” Marjorie patted her arm, matter-of-fact, already turning to shout a lunch order at a cluster of teenagers on the porch. “Give it a day. You’ll see.”
A young boy no older than seven broke from the crowd and barreled straight into Jace’s legs with the force of a small missile, and Jace caught him without breaking stride, hoisting him onto one hip in the same motion, wholly automatic.
“Uncle Jace, is she the fiancée?” The boy studied Emma with the frank, unfiltered assessment only children ever managed. “Aunt Marjorie said you’d bring somebody eventually, but she also said you’d probably mess it up first.”
“Aunt Marjorie talks too much.” Jace set him down without missing a beat, and steered Emma toward the porch, palm warm at her waist. “This is Emma. Be nice, or I’ll tell your mother about the tree fort.”
The boy’s eyes went wide with betrayal, and he vanished back into the crowd at a dead sprint, and Emma found herself laughing, real and unguarded, for the first time since they’d left the city.
The war room occupied the lodge’s east wing, a long timber table already covered in Emma’s spreading collection of property records, satellite imagery, and the aged map Walter had died to deliver.
Emma worked through the afternoon with a focus that only cracked when Jace appeared at her shoulder every hour or so, coffee in hand, a kiss dropped against her temple before he vanished again to handle the next fire that needed putting out.
She’d stopped questioning the rhythm of it days ago.
It read less as a distraction and more as punctuation.
By evening, the pattern had fully resolved itself, and her stomach dropped clean through the floor looking at it.
“He’s not only after one parcel.” She turned the laptop toward Jace, overlaying the historical property records against Walter’s map.
“Look at the timeline. Shell purchases dating back eleven years, every one of them ringing the eastern and southern boundary. The Chairman has been closing this net since before you took over pack leadership.”
“Show me the last piece.”
She pulled up the final parcel, the one circled in red ink on Walter’s original map, and watched Jace go very still, granite settling into every line of him.
“That’s the access corridor.” His voice had gone flat, controlled, the calm she’d learned meant barely restrained fury.
“Emergency vehicles, expansion rights, the only legal route in or out that doesn’t require crossing three other properties.
If Kane closes that parcel, this pack loses the ability to grow, to evacuate quickly, to do anything but exist like this, forever, at his mercy. ”
“That’s not chance at all. It’s the whole point of the ring.” Emma reached for his hand without thinking, needing the contact as much as offering it. “He’s not trying to hurt the pack. He’s trying to own it.”
The family council convened at dusk around the same long table, and Emma found herself facing a room noticeably more intimidating than any boardroom she’d ever walked into for work.
Jace’s father sat at the head with the settled authority of thirty years leading this pack before handing it over, silver at his temples, eyes sharp despite the easy set of his shoulders.
His mother sat beside him, arms crossed, studying Emma with the sharp, deliberate attention of a woman deciding exactly how much to trust a stranger holding her son’s future.
Gerri arrived last, sweeping in with a suitcase clearly packed for a longer stay than anyone had invited her to.
“Darling, I saw the guest room on my way in, and I have concerns. It’s charming, but it’s also far too celibate for two people engaged to be married.
I’ll be speaking to someone about the throw pillows. ”
“Gerri.”
“I’m simply saying the energy is off.” She dropped into a chair and gestured for Emma to begin, as if she hadn’t just derailed the whole meeting.
An older man near the end of the table—one of the pack elders, silver-bearded, arms crossed with the skepticism of someone who’d sat through far too many outsider presentations—cut in before Emma finished her first sentence.
“Forgive me, but you’re an accountant. Why does the pack need a spreadsheet to tell us our own land is under threat?”
“Because your own land has forty years of buried paperwork you’ve never once had reason to read, and I read paperwork for a living.
” Emma didn’t blink. “Deed restrictions, easements, conservation clauses nobody’s looked at since your grandfather’s time—old paperwork has a way of holding real teeth long after everyone’s forgotten it’s there.
I’d bet money there’s at least one clause buried in this pack’s original filings that nobody’s thought about in decades. ”
She let that settle before she went on. “You’ve been defending this territory with instinct. That’s kept you alive so far. It won’t stop a man who’s spent a decade buying the legal right to starve you out. For that, you need someone who speaks his language better than he does.”
The elder studied her for a long beat, then let out a short, surprised laugh. “Fair enough.”
Emma laid out the pattern with the same clean precision she’d have used on a courtroom exhibit—the shell companies, the timeline, the final parcel and everything it threatened—and watched three veteran alphas who’d walked in prepared to humor a human accountant slowly stop humoring her and start listening.
“She’s right.” Jace’s father spoke first, studying the map with a frown that had nothing dismissive left in it.
“I remember when the county first opened that corridor for review. Nobody thought to lock down the deed restrictions because nobody imagined a threat patient enough to wait a decade for the opening.”
“I imagined it.” Emma met his eyes without flinching. “It’s what I do for a living. Recognizing patience is patient people trying not to look patient.”
The old alpha’s expression shifted—respect, slow and real, the kind that had to be earned rather than given. “Jace didn’t oversell you.”
“He undersold me, honestly,” Emma said, and the room’s answering laugh eased a tightness in her chest she hadn’t realized was there.
“What do you need from us?” Jace’s father leaned forward, all business now, thirty years of leadership showing plain in the set of his shoulders. “Legal standing, manpower, or both.”
“Both, eventually. Legal standing first.” Emma pulled up the deed history on her laptop, turning it so the whole table could see.
“The corridor’s protected under an old conservation clause.
If we can get the county to recognize the original restriction before Kane closes on the parcel, he loses the entire strategy in one filing.
I need someone who can move a records request through the county office faster than the standard six weeks. ”
“I know a clerk who owes this family a favor.” Jace’s mother spoke for the first time, dry and certain. “She’ll move it in two days if I ask nicely. Three if I have to be less nice about it.”