Page 29 of Howl Lotta Love

Two figures in dark clothing moved through the archive’s back hallway like they’d walked it a hundred times. A third waited by the door. Badge scanned. Keycard used. Someone with legitimate access who hadn’t needed to break anything to get in.

The camera caught his face for one clean second before he turned.

Emma’s stomach fell straight through the floor.

“Rewind it.” Her own voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. “Tucker, rewind it, right now.”

He did, without a word. The frame froze. Emma’s whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature and everything to do with recognizing every line of that face—the reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, the tie he’d worn to every deposition she’d ever watched him give, the particular tilt of his head whenever he ran numbers he didn’t want anyone watching him run.

“That’s Walter.” The words barely made it out. “That’s Walter Pierce.”

Her mentor. The man who’d taught her to read a ledger for the lie hiding under the numbers. The man who’d sat with her until midnight before her first deposition, running mock cross-examinations until she stopped shaking. The man who’d shown up to her graduation with a bouquet of grocery-store carnations because he said real florists overcharged for sentiment, and she’d kept one pressed in a book for six years because nobody had ever done anything that small and that kind for her.

He’d taught her every trick a person used to hide inside a set of numbers.

He’d never once mentioned he could hide the same way inside a person’s trust, if she loved him enough not to check.

Her hands started shaking. She set the coffee mug down hard enough that it cracked against the counter, because holding it steady had stopped being possible.

“Emma.” Jace’s hand closed around her shoulder, firm, grounding, the only solid thing in a room that had tilted sideways without warning. “Look at me.”

She couldn’t. Not yet. She kept her eyes locked on the frozen frame, on the man who’d built half of who she’d become, waiting for it to resolve into a version that made sense.

It didn’t. It wasn’t going to.

“Run it again,” she said, and this time her voice came out stripped down to the bone, the sound of a woman nailing a lid shut before the thing underneath could get out and do more damage than it already had. “I want to see his face again.”

Tucker ran it again without being asked twice, quiet in a way that told her he understood exactly what this was costing her.

“He knows the building.” Her voice steadied, sentence by sentence, competence sliding back on like armor because it was the only thing left she had to wear. “Archive layout. Retention schedule. Which files matter most. Whoever’s running this didn’t hire muscle. They hired someone who already knew precisely what to steal, and they got him from somewhere close enough to me that it ought to terrify all of us. My mentor.”

“You didn’t see this coming.” Jace’s hand hadn’t moved off her shoulder.

“I was supposed to. That’s my entire job.”

“You trusted a man who spent years earning it. That’s not a failure. It’s what trust is built to do.” His grip tightened once, grounding rather than restraining. “We’re finding out why tonight if I have to take the city apart to do it. You’re not carrying this alone.”

Emma nodded, already reaching for her coat, spine straight. Sitting still with this betrayal was no longer a position she could hold, and she intended to hear Walter’s reasons straight from his own mouth, tonight, before the shock had time to soften into anything gentler than he deserved. Some ghosts got to stay comfortable. This one had lost that privilege the moment his face hit the screen.

NINE

JACE

Walter didn’t answer his phone that night, or the night after. Emma went to his building anyway, badge and fury and half a dozen questions loaded and ready, only to find his office already cleared out, no forwarding address, like the man had simply stopped existing the moment his face hit that security feed. Jace talked her out of chasing further—not because the anger wasn’t earned, but because a confrontation with no leverage behind it would only warn a man with thirty years of practice covering his tracks to disappear for good. So they’d waited instead. Watched. Kept building the case in silence and let the nights that followed be, for once, almost normal.

A few nights after the Kane Foundation gala, Roman had the whole table on its feet with glasses raised before the waiter finished pouring. “To the world’s least convincing fake engagement. May it continue to convince absolutely nobody.”

“That’s not a toast. That’s an insult wearing a garnish.”

“It’s both.” Roman clinked his glass against Jace’s without waiting for permission. “Sit down. Eat a steak. This is mandatory alpha morale, ordered by me, effective immediately.”

“You can’t order mandatory anything. You don’t outrank me.”

“I outrank you in fun. Different scoreboard.” Roman dropped into the booth, Diesel sliding in beside him, quick and quiet, claiming the seat facing the door before anyone else thought to want it. Tucker took the end, laptop bag still over one shoulder even at dinner, and Milo slid in last, phone already out, thumbs going a mile a minute.

A waiter arrived with bread and a wine list Roman waved off without a glance. “Bring the good bottle. The one we don’t let Diesel order because he picks based on label color.”

“The label color is a legitimate metric.”