Page 28 of Howl Lotta Love

“You. Tiramisu.”

“It’s good.”

“You drink black coffee out of spite and eat plain chicken for every meal. This doesn’t fit the brand.”

“I contain layers. Like an onion.”

She stole a bite before he could stop her, and the look he gave her—scandalized, fond, far too warm—landed complicated and warm in her chest. The espresso had nothing on it.

They walked back through the park because the day was too good to waste on a cab, and three blocks in, Jace told her about the night Roman tried to cook dinner for the whole team and set off the fire suppression system so badly, Diesel spent a week finding soaked protein bars in places nobody could explain.

“Took out the entire kitchen. Over spaghetti.”

“How does a person burn spaghetti.”

“Roman finds a way. He always finds a way.” He was laughing—a full, unguarded sound she’d never heard out of him, and it rearranged his whole face, younger, looser, noticeably more dangerous to her composure than the scowl he usually wore. “Diesel banned him from the stove for life. Roman still calls it a betrayal.”

“I like Diesel’s odds of holding that line.”

“Diesel’s held tougher lines than a man with a spatula.” He glanced over, still smiling, his face softening further at the sight of hers. “You’re smiling.”

“I’m allowed.”

“You don’t. Much. Not like this.”

“Making an exception.” She bumped his shoulder with hers, easy, natural in a way that would’ve read impossible not too long ago, back when he was a stranger who’d caught her in a ballroom and derailed her entire life without asking. “Don’t get used to it.”

“Too late.”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Didn’t look for one either. They walked the rest of the way in a quiet worth keeping, and Emma spent the whole distance trying to remember the last time a case had registered as the least important part of her day.

The map ate the whole corner of the house’s formal dining room, newly dubbed the “evidence room”—by midnight, property records overlaid on a printed city grid, pins marking every acquisition Tucker had traced.

She’d tried sending Jace to bed an hour ago. He’d made it as far as the doorway, doubled back with coffee she hadn’t asked for, and planted himself on the couch instead—arms crossed, watching her work, a man clearly settling in for the night rather than leaving her alone with a case at two in the morning. She hadn’t fought it very hard. She was starting to understand that fighting that instinct in him cost more energy than it saved.

Pin by pin, the picture built itself. She stopped seeing purchases and started seeing the negative space between them—the shape the untouched land made once she quit tracking what Kane bought and started tracking what he’d bought it around.

She stepped back to take in the whole board at once, and the pattern she’d been circling all day snapped into a shape she recognized.

A ring. Every purchase sat on the perimeter of paranormal infrastructure—two hospitals, a women’s shelter, three supply routes, a scattering of parcels that meant nothing alone and everything as a whole. He hadn’t been buying scattered land. He’d been closing a circle, one purchase at a time, patient enough that nobody watching the money would ever think to check the map.

Her stomach dropped somewhere around three a.m., the moment the pattern finished assembling itself behind her eyes.

“This isn’t theft.” Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “It’s a siege.”

Jace was on his feet before she finished the sentence, crossing to stand beside her, tracing the pattern with his eyes the way she’d only moments ago traced it with her hands. “He’s not stealing money. He’s buying a chokehold. Cut the hospitals, the shelters, the routes, and it doesn’t matter who owns what anymore. Nobody moves without going through him first.”

“That’s not a fraud case.”

“No. It isn’t.”

She was still staring at the map, phone half raised to call Gerri, when the alarm tore through the house.

Not a drill. Not the safe house’s usual quiet hum of cameras and sensors. A full breach alert, red and screaming, Tucker’s voice cutting through the intercom, all his usual humor burned clean off it.

“Wilder Hope archive. Someone’s inside. They’re taking hard copies.”

Emma was moving before she’d finished processing the words, taking the stairs two at a time behind Jace toward the basement command center, where Tucker already had a recovered feed pulled up, grainy, time-stamped twenty minutes back.