Page 38 of Howl Lotta Love

“I’m calling it DefinitelyNotEvidence.zip,” Tucker said, without looking up, “because if anyone ever subpoenas my naming conventions, I want plausible deniability.”

“That’s not how plausible deniability works.”

“It’s how mine works.” He spun one monitor toward her. “Forty-one shell companies. Every single one traces back through two or three shells to the same umbrella entity.”

Emma leaned in, scanning names she half-recognized from months of cross-referencing, watching them collapse one by one into a single point of origin on Tucker’s screen.

“Kane Strategic Holdings.” She said it flat, the whole conspiracy finally sitting undeniably in front of her. “It was never charities skimming each other. It was always only him.”

“Him, and whoever’s funding him at a level even I can’t trace yet.” Tucker’s jaw tightened, the closest he came to visibly rattled. “There’s a name buried three shells deep that keeps recurring. No face. No public record. Only a title.”

“What title?”

“The Chairman.” Tucker let that sit a moment before scrolling on, because none of them had anything useful to say about a threat they couldn’t yet fully picture.

Emma kept scrolling, half her attention on the files, half of it still four hours behind her in a warehouse that smelled like machine oil and blood, and near the bottom of the folder structure a document caught her eye that made her stomach drop clean through the floor.

A list. Acquisition targets, scheduled and dated, properties Kane intended to close on within the month.

Third from the top: the Wilder Hope Foundation’s largest satellite campus, the one that ran three shelters and a children’s clinic, the one Gerri Wilder had built with forty years of her own money and every ounce of the fight left in her.

“Jace.” Emma’s voice had gone very quiet. “He’s coming for Gerri next.”

The room went still. Tucker stopped typing. Roman, who’d been leaning against the doorframe with the last of his adrenaline still working its way out of his shoulders, straightened up, the humor wiped clean off his face at once.

“Timeline,” Jace said, crossing to look over her shoulder, voice gone flat and lethal the way it always did the moment a threat stopped being theoretical.

“Three weeks.” Emma tapped the date twice, hoping repetition might change it. “He’s going to take the one place in this city that has genuinely kept people safe, and he’s going to do it with paperwork instead of bullets, and nobody’s going to see it coming until the deed’s already signed.”

Emma stared at the file a moment longer, at Nina’s name nowhere on it and her fingerprints all over the fact that it existed at all, and closed the laptop with hands that had finally, mercifully, stopped shaking.

ELEVEN

EMMA

The regional map now took up an entire wall of the command center, and Emma had stopped being able to look away from it.

“Expand the radius again.” She tapped the edge of the current overlay, restless, chasing a pattern that kept growing every time she thought she’d found its edge. “Kane’s acquisitions don’t stop at the city line. Show me everything within a hundred miles.”

Tucker didn’t argue. He’d stopped arguing with her instincts three days ago, right around the time they’d started being right more often than not. The map redrew itself, pins multiplying outward from Manhattan in a slow bloom that made Emma’s stomach drop lower with every new cluster.

“You’re doing the thing where you don’t blink,” Roman said, from the doorway, arms full of what appeared to be every snack the safe house had left in its cabinets. “Worried face or productive face? I genuinely can’t tell anymore.”

“Ask me again in ten minutes.”

“I brought reinforcements, either way.” He dumped the haul within reach and dropped into a chair backward, watching the map bloom wider with the interest of a man who honestly enjoyed watching other people work as long as he didn’t have to do the work himself. “Tell me it’s good news.”

“It’s the opposite of good news, and I’m about to ruin your whole week.”

“Story of my life lately.” Roman stole a handful of pretzels and settled in to watch the disaster unfold, which Emma had come to recognize as his version of moral support.

Jace stood at her shoulder, arms crossed, close enough that she could feel his heat without either of them making a production out of it—an ease that hadn’t existed between them two weeks ago and now read as the most natural thing in the world. He pressed a kiss against her temple without breaking focus on the screen, one hand settling low and possessive at her waist like it had always lived there.

“There.” His voice went cold, the tone he only used when sizing up a threat instead of reacting to one. “Upstate. That’s not city infrastructure.”

Emma followed his finger to a dense cluster of red pins ringing a stretch of forest two hours north, and it clicked into place with a cold, sick certainty.

“That’s my family’s land.” He said it without inflection, flat in the specific way she’d learned meant he was one wrong word from losing that flatness entirely. His jaw ticked once, hard. “Kane’s been closing a ring around my pack for years, and none of us saw it, because we were all watching the money instead of the map.”