20. Emma #2
“I’m not finished.” She jabbed a finger at Jace’s chest. “You. Mopey. Broody. Four years of telling me you didn’t need a match before I finally shoved a photograph in your face.
You owe me a fruit basket the size of a small car.
” The finger swung to Emma. “You. I liked you within seconds of meeting you, which is a personal record, and I would like a thank-you card.” She threw her arms around them both at once, fierce and quick.
“I’m so glad you’re both alive. Get in the helicopter before I start crying in front of federal agents, which isn’t the reputation I’ve spent decades building. ”
Jace Maddox
The weeks that followed moved fast in the way recovery always did—slow when you were living it, a blur in hindsight.
Emma worked with federal investigators from a hospital bed for the first three days and from Maddox Command for the two weeks after that, cataloging evidence with the same relentless precision she’d brought to every ledger since this entire war began.
Kane and the Chairman both faced indictment on charges that filled several pages—though the indictment listed the Chairman only by the alias he’d used to open his first shell company.
Even federal prosecutors, Tucker reported with some disgust, hadn’t managed to find his real name.
Twenty years of patience apparently bought a man that much, even in handcuffs.
The Chairman’s real name never surfaced. But another name did, and it hit the room harder than the Chairman’s silence ever could have.
“Corbin.” Tucker turned the monitor around, three shell layers peeled back on-screen, a face Emma recognized from a boardroom table not too long ago.
“Board credentials at Wilder Hope gave him legitimate-looking access to the shared security channel we use to coordinate with Gerri’s foundation. He’d been skimming our briefing traffic since sometime after the Kane Foundation gala—small stuff, nothing we’d have caught at the time.”
His jaw tightened. “That’s also how Kane’s people knew the Riverside archive layout cold the night they torched it. Corbin pulled the campus schematics off that same channel two weeks earlier, filed under a routine security review nobody thought twice about.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Roman set down the sandwich he’d been eating and didn’t pick it back up.
“Get Gerri,” Jace said finally. “She needs to hear this from us before she hears it from a courtroom.”
Gerri arrived within the hour, and she read the file standing up, in silence, all the way through twice, while Emma and Jace waited without offering to make it easier for her.
“Nine years.” She finally set the folder down, very precisely, on the center of the table.
“I sat across from that man at a hundred board meetings. I gave him access I don’t give my own accountant.
” Her voice hadn’t risen at all, which was somehow worse than if it had.
“I trusted him because trusting people is the entire reason any of this works, and I have never once regretted it before tonight.”
“Gerri—”
“I’m not finished.” She held up one hand, and for the first time since Emma had known her, there wasn’t a joke waiting behind it.
“You’ve wondered—I’ve watched you both wonder, since the very beginning—why a woman with my resources hired one forensic accountant out of a walk-up office instead of a firm with a marble lobby and a dozen names on the letterhead. ”
She looked at Emma directly. “Because I stopped trusting rooms with a dozen names in them long before Corbin. Big firms leak. Somebody always owes somebody a favor, and favors are how men like Victor Kane get a foot in the door. I went looking for one person nobody would think to compromise, because nobody thinks a one-woman operation is worth compromising until it’s too late to stop her.
” Her mouth curved, thin and proud despite everything.
“I was right about you. I only wish I’d been wrong about him. ”
She had Corbin removed from every board she controlled by the end of the week—no press statement, no public accounting, only a single line struck from a letterhead and a silence that outlasted the gossip.
It was, Emma understood, the closest thing to a eulogy the betrayal was ever going to get out of her.
Farraday took a plea deal inside the month, and Whitmore and Alderidge both resigned their board seats within days of each other rather than wait to be pushed.
Dozens more embedded accountants went down alongside Kane, the Chairman, and Corbin—exposed by exactly the kind of patient, thorough work Emma had built her entire career on.
Frozen charity accounts thawed. The clinic reopened its doors within a month. The scholarship fund Gerri had been quietly panicking about for weeks was fully restored, along with every other organization that had nearly collapsed under twenty years of patient theft.
Emma personally called three separate program directors only to hear their voices when she told them the money was coming back, and Jace watched her cry happy tears at his kitchen table more than once, never once minding how many times it happened.
Nina’s family got the truth and a formal federal commendation for her bravery and sacrifice—the first thing Emma made sure of, before anything else on the list.
“This is what it was for,” she told him, wiping her eyes and laughing at herself in the same breath. “This exact thing. I forget sometimes, in the middle of all the danger, that the whole point was always this.”
He kissed her temple and didn’t correct the tears, because some things didn’t need correcting.
The pack gathered at the Alpha Lodge three weeks after the bridge, a celebration weeks in the making finally allowed to happen, and Jace stood at the head of the great room with Emma’s hand in his—a sapphire catching the lamplight at her finger, the same stone Gerri had chosen for her weeks before either of them would admit the engagement might turn real—and the entire community watching.
“Most of you already know her.” His voice carried easily across the packed room, steady in a way that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with certainty.
He kept one arm banded around her waist, unwilling to leave more than a few inches of space between them even for a speech.
“Some of you watched the engagement announcement happen before either of us fully understood what it meant. I’m not introducing a fiancée today.
I’m introducing my mate, my equal, and the future Alpha Female of this pack—not because tradition demands it, but because she has already proven, a dozen times over, exactly who she is. ”
The room erupted. Emma, blinking back tears for what had to be the hundredth time that month, squeezed his hand and found her own voice once the noise settled.
“I want to add one thing.” She scanned the crowd, finding Gerri, finding the directors of half a dozen charities who’d flown in for this exact reason.
“The theft that nearly destroyed this community happened because nobody was watching closely enough, for long enough, in the right places. That ends today. I’m establishing a permanent financial oversight council, funded and staffed to make sure no one ever does what Kane and the Chairman did again.
It’s named for Nina Alvarez, the compliance analyst who died getting us the evidence that started all of this.
She doesn’t get to be a footnote in somebody else’s case file. Not in mine.”
The applause that followed nearly took the roof off.
The celebration afterward was loud, chaotic, and utterly unlike anything either of them had experienced side by side before—music, barbecue, and a level of teasing that started the moment the formal speeches ended and showed no sign of stopping.
Roman presented Jace with a ceramic mug the moment he found a quiet corner, grinning ear to ear, clearly having waited months for exactly this opportunity.
“For the office. I had it custom made.” The mug read, in bold cheerful letters, WORLD’S SOFTEST ALPHA. “I want to see this on your desk every single day for the rest of your natural life, so every visiting alpha who comes to negotiate with you understands exactly who they’re dealing with.”
“I will throw this in the lake.”
“You’ll display it prominently, because deep down you know it’s accurate, and also because Emma’s standing right there and you’re not going to embarrass her by throwing a gift in front of company.”
Emma, standing right there, did nothing to discourage the mug’s survival, and kissed Jace’s cheek, which made the decision for him.
Milo materialized at Jace’s other elbow, a moment later, hand out, entirely unfazed by the interruption.
“The betting pool has closed. You both owe me considerably more than pride now.” He caught Jace’s look and softened it, just slightly.
“We shut it down the second she went missing, for the record. Didn’t feel right running odds on somebody while we were busy praying she was okay.
Started it back up the moment Tucker found that spreadsheet, because at that point it felt more like a celebration than a bet. ”
When Jace only stared at him, Milo elaborated, patient as ever.
“I called the week, down to the day, four years ago, when Roman opened the first pool. Nobody ever believes me, and I win every single time regardless.” He pocketed the bills Roman produced with a groan of profound betrayal, and wandered off toward the barbecue, matter closed.