17. Emma #2
“I meant it at the lodge. Every word.” His voice had gone quiet, unguarded in a way she rarely got from him even now.
“But there’s a piece of that first night I never told you.
I did more than catch you in that ballroom.
I smelled you three full seconds before you turned the corner, and every instinct I owned went still and then loud all at once, and I spent the rest of that gala trying to convince myself it was coincidence.
It wasn’t coincidence. My wolf knew exactly what you were to me before I’d said a single word to you.
It’s only gotten more certain since. Tonight most of all. ”
“That’s noticeably more romantic than anything you’ve admitted before.”
“I’m choosing my moments better lately.” He tipped her chin up, kissed her slow and thorough, one hand sliding into her hair while the other banded firm around her waist, and rested his forehead against hers when they broke apart.
“Promise me one thing. No matter what comes next, you trust me. You don’t go anywhere alone.
You let me protect you, even when it costs you some control you’d rather keep. ”
“I promise.” The lie sat easy on her tongue, because it wasn’t quite a lie—she trusted him without reservation.
She simply also trusted herself, and after tonight’s argument she understood a fact she hadn’t fully accepted before: he would never, not in a hundred years, agree to what she was about to do, no matter how she framed it, no matter how carefully she argued the tactical merits.
Loving him meant he would try to take the danger for himself instead, every single time, and she couldn’t let that happen either.
The only way through this protected everyone she loved, and it required doing the one thing she’d only now promised not to do.
He kissed her again, unaware of the calculation running underneath her words, unhurried and thorough enough that for several long minutes she almost let herself forget the plan entirely. Almost.
She didn’t. She held onto him a little longer, memorizing the feel of his arms around her, and let herself have this fully before the harder part of the night began.
She waited until he finally slept, exhaustion catching up with him somewhere past three in the morning, and lay awake beside him for a long while first, memorizing the sound of his breathing, his arm thrown heavy across her waist even in sleep, like some animal part of him refused to stop guarding her even unconscious.
I’m sorry. She didn’t let herself finish the thought any further than that, because finishing it meant admitting how badly this could go.
She slipped out of bed with the same careful precision she used for reading a fraudulent ledger, dressing in the dark, moving around a decade of tactical training she’d absorbed without meaning to over these past weeks.
The silver bracelet caught the low light on the nightstand, panic trigger coiled inside its clasp, and she made herself set it down instead of fastening it on.
Two taps and the whole team would know her exact location inside four seconds—which meant Kane’s people would know it too, the moment they searched her and found it, and meant Jace would come running straight into whatever waited for her before she’d finished setting the trap.
She wasn’t ready to be found yet. She needed to be taken.
She left it coiled on the pillow where he’d see it before he saw the note, because some part of her needed him to know she hadn’t forgotten it.
She’d chosen to leave it behind on purpose.
The note took four attempts to get right. She settled on the truth, stripped down to its essentials: I love you. I’m doing this so nobody else I love gets hurt reaching for me. You already told me no, and you were right to, and I did it anyway. Don’t blame yourself.
She pressed one last kiss to his temple, featherlight, careful not to wake him, and made herself leave before her resolve found a crack to slip through.
She wasn’t leaving the last hard proof of Kane’s crimes somewhere it could be searched and burned while she was gone, and if Kane’s people wanted her cooperation, proof of his own guilt sitting under his nose might buy her time nobody else could.
She tucked Walter’s original documents into the lining of her jacket, the one place a body search might reasonably miss.
The drive to Kane’s main office building stretched endless and immediate at once. She parked out front, walked to the front door, and let herself be seen near the security camera she’d clocked from the gala that seemed like forever ago.
They took her within minutes. Professional, efficient, no unnecessary violence—which told her everything about how badly Kane wanted her alive and cooperative.
A hood went over her head for the drive, disorienting but not unkind, and Emma spent the ride counting turns and estimating speed the way she’d trained herself to over the past weeks without ever expecting to need the skill this directly.
Twelve minutes. Four turns. A stretch of rougher road near the end that suggested an industrial lot.
They walked her through a service entrance, down a corridor lined with fluorescent lights half of which had burned out, and into an office far more elegant than the building’s exterior ever suggested.
Emma cataloged everything on the way in without meaning to—camera placements, guard rotations, the unusual weight of the door hinges that suggested reinforced steel underneath ordinary paint.
Old habits, apparently, didn’t care whether their owner was currently a prisoner.
Victor Kane rose from behind a desk with the easy, practiced warmth of a man greeting an honored guest instead of a prisoner.
“Welcome, Miss Burke.” His smile carried the confidence of someone who’d already won and simply hadn’t announced it yet. “I imagine you have questions. Let me answer the largest one first. Now you’ll finally meet the man who built this empire.”
A door opened behind him, unhurried, and an elderly man stepped out of the shadows with the quiet, unbothered stillness of someone who had never once needed to raise his voice.
Jace Maddox
Jace woke at dawn to an empty bed and a folded note on the pillow where Emma’s head belonged.
The bracelet sat beside it, coiled and silent, panic trigger untapped and utterly useless to him now. She’d left it on purpose. That single fact told him more than the note did about how deliberate this had been, and how little chance he’d ever had of talking her out of it.
He read the note twice before the words fully landed, and when they did, the composure that had held steady through every crisis in this entire investigation finally, completely gave out.
“EMMA!” The shout tore out of him before he’d consciously decided to make it, already moving, already searching a house she clearly wasn’t in, already knowing with a cold, sick certainty what she’d done and why she’d done it.
He’d told her no. He’d held her face in his hands and told her no, and she’d looked him dead in the eye and let him believe it had landed.
Roman found him in the hallway, tearing it apart with a violence that had nothing left of his usual discipline in it. “Boss—”
“She’s gone.” Jace’s voice came out barely human. “She proposed this exact plan to my face last night and I said no, and she went to sleep in my arms and let me believe I’d won that argument, and I was fool enough to genuinely believe it.”
“Jace.” Roman’s tone went uncharacteristically serious, the joking dropped away, gone somewhere he only visited maybe twice a year. “We’re going to find her.”
“I know we’re going to find her.” Jace crumpled the note in one fist, wolf and man both screaming the same demand underneath the words. “I need every warrior we have. I need Tucker tracing every vehicle that left a two-mile radius of this house in the last six hours.”
Tucker arrived at a flat sprint, laptop already open, face grim. “License plate match on one of our vans that passed two intersections near here at three-forty this morning. Headed toward downtown. It has to be her going to Kane’s office building.”
“He’ll take her somewhere else.” Jace didn’t slow down, didn’t sit, didn’t let himself do anything but move, because stopping meant facing exactly what he’d let happen on his watch. “I want satellite eyes on that building.”
Tucker didn’t argue, didn’t offer false comfort, only nodded and got back to work, which said more than any reassurance could have.
Gerri arrived within the hour, having apparently developed a supernatural instinct for exactly when catastrophe struck, surveyed the war room reassembling itself around her, and delivered her verdict.
“If she was going to walk into danger alone, the least she could have done was take snacks. Nobody thinks clearly on an empty stomach, and I raised that girl better than this, engagement or no engagement.” She set her bag down and rolled up her sleeves, all business beneath the complaint.
“Now. Tell me what you need, and tell me fast. I have contacts who owe me a lot more favors than they’d like to admit. ”
Roman muttered under his breath about rescue missions always getting more complicated once people fell in love, and how he’d have won considerably more of his own betting pool if he’d accounted for exactly this outcome months ago, back when the pool first started. Nobody had the energy to laugh at it.