Page 3 of Howl Lotta Love

“Your paperwork is in excellent order. That’s what makes it work.” Emma tapped the matching entries, one charity to the next. “Whoever’s doing this understands nonprofit accounting well enough to hide inside it. This isn’t sloppy. It’s surgical.”

Recognition settled over Gerri’s face—not shock, Emma noted out of habit, but the look of a woman confirming a suspicion she’d been sitting on for a while and had finally found someone sharp enough to hand it to.

“How many charities do you think it touches?”

“I won’t know until I look at all of them.”

“Then look at all of them.” Gerri said it the way other people ordered a second round of drinks, though nothing in her eyes was that casual. “Name your rate and triple it. Clear your schedule. I want to know how deep this runs, and I want to know before whoever’s doing it realizes anyone noticed.”

Every professional instinct told her to ask for terms in writing, name a number, negotiate the fine print, walk in with her eyes fully open instead of her curiosity three steps ahead of her judgment. She ignored all of it and looked at the women’s shelter ledger—careful books, bled slowly one invisible fraction at a time by somebody who’d never have to look those residents in the eye—and the calm, organized rage that had built her entire career snapped fully on.

Injustice never made her raise her voice. It made her open a new spreadsheet.

“I’ll need access to every charity in your network. Full financial history, board records, vendor contracts. And nobody outside this room finds out I’m looking.”

“Done.” Gerri’s smile became sharp at the edges, pleased in a way that suggested Emma had passed a test without knowing one had been handed out. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to say yes to that.”

Emma stacked the files, already mapping out the next month in her head—late nights, cross-referenced spreadsheets, the quiet satisfaction of watching a hidden scheme become visible one entry at a time. It didn’t occur to her yet to wonder why a woman with Gerri Wilder’s money hadn’t simply hired a real firm with a marble lobby and a dozen names on the letterhead. That question would show up later, uninvited, at a much worse time.

Gerri watched her gather everything, clearly pleased with what she’d come for, and turned for the door, one hand lingering on the frame as she glanced back.

“Eat. Sleep occasionally. Don’t die before you’re useful to me.” She said it like a blessing, which, from Gerri, it more or less was. Then, mostly to herself, crossing an old and very patient item off a very long list, “Now. I need my wolf.”

She was gone before Emma could ask what that meant.

Emma left the Wilder Hope Foundation a little after midnight, arms full of files. The night air hit differently after hours of being couped up inside—sharp, almost bracing—and for half a block the back of her neck prickled with the stubborn, useless certainty that someone was watching her walk to the corner.

She glanced back. Empty sidewalk. Parked cars. A cab idling at the light. Nothing.

She blamed it on adrenaline and too little sleep, flagged the cab down anyway because arguing with her own nerves at midnight was a fight not worth winning, and spent the ride composing an audit schedule in her head instead of thinking about a stranger’s hands.

She thought about them anyway. The entire ride home. Somewhere around Fifty-Seventh Street she gave up pretending otherwise, informed her own reflection in the cab window that she had a fraud ring to catch and no time for a man whose name she didn’t even know, and immediately lost that argument too.

A flash of movement snagged the edge of her vision—a shape in the shadow of a delivery awning across the street, phone raised, angled at the building behind her. Maybe at her. Gone before she could get a second look, swallowed by the corner and the dark.

She twisted around in her seat for a better angle and found nothing but an empty sidewalk and one deeply indifferent pigeon. Party paranoia, she decided, tucked neatly alongside the champagne headache she didn’t remember earning and the warmth still humming faintly behind her ribs. She had bigger problems tonight. She hadn’t met all of them yet.

TWO

JACE

“Diesel, hold the gallery entrance till Priya’s people clear the walkthrough, then rotate north.” Jace didn’t hesitate in his office building’s lobby, badge out, the guard at the desk already stepping back. “Roman. Tell me the transport route’s still clean.”

Three ops running at once and not one person on his payroll had asked an unnecessary question all morning. They didn’t need to. Even though he wasn’t at any of the locations, he was four moves past what they were about to ask, same as always.

“Clean, boss. Ran it twice.” Roman’s voice crackled in, parking-garage echo under it. “Also, I want it on record that I called the second tunnel a bad idea back in March and nobody listened.”

“Third time you’ve said that.”

“Fourth. I’ll keep saying it till somebody buys me a drink about it.”

Jace didn’t smile. Didn’t need to—Roman would clock it anyway, some shift in the air the whole team had learned to read years ago.

“Milo. How’s the patient?”

“Boring, which I love.” Papers shuffled on the other end. “Ribs are healing clean, he’s cleared for desk duty, and I’ve informed him that wolf skin does not repel bullets. Also I’m not doing this again with a patient who bites.”

“Tucker.”