Page 60 of Howl Lotta Love

They walked her through a service entrance, down a corridor lined with fluorescent lights half of which had burned out, and into an office far more elegant than the building’s exterior ever suggested. Emma cataloged everything on the way in without meaning to—camera placements, guard rotations, the unusual weight of the door hinges that suggested reinforced steel underneath ordinary paint. Old habits, apparently, didn’t care whether their owner was currently a prisoner.

Victor Kane rose from behind a desk with the easy, practiced warmth of a man greeting an honored guest instead of a prisoner.

“Welcome, Miss Burke.” His smile carried the confidence of someone who’d already won and simply hadn’t announced it yet. “I imagine you have questions. Let me answer the largest one first. Now you’ll finally meet the man who built this empire.”

A door opened behind him, unhurried, and an elderly man stepped out of the shadows with the quiet, unbothered stillness of someone who had never once needed to raise his voice.

Jace Maddox

Jace woke at dawn to an empty bed and a folded note on the pillow where Emma’s head belonged.

The bracelet sat beside it, coiled and silent, panic trigger untapped and utterly useless to him now. She’d left it on purpose. That single fact told him more than the note did about how deliberate this had been, and how little chance he’d ever had of talking her out of it.

He read the note twice before the words fully landed, and when they did, the composure that had held steady through every crisis in this entire investigation finally, completely gave out.

“EMMA!” The shout tore out of him before he’d consciously decided to make it, already moving, already searching a house she clearly wasn’t in, already knowing with a cold, sick certainty what she’d done and why she’d done it. He’d told her no. He’d held her face in his hands and told her no, and she’d looked him dead in the eye and let him believe it had landed.

Roman found him in the hallway, tearing it apart with a violence that had nothing left of his usual discipline in it. “Boss⁠—”

“She’s gone.” Jace’s voice came out barely human. “She proposed this exact plan to my face last night and I said no, and she went to sleep in my arms and let me believe I’d won that argument, and I was fool enough to genuinely believe it.”

“Jace.” Roman’s tone went uncharacteristically serious, the joking dropped away, gone somewhere he only visited maybe twice a year. “We’re going to find her.”

“I know we’re going to find her.” Jace crumpled the note in one fist, wolf and man both screaming the same demand underneath the words. “I need every warrior we have. I need Tucker tracing every vehicle that left a two-mile radius of this house in the last six hours.”

Tucker arrived at a flat sprint, laptop already open, face grim. “License plate match on one of our vans that passed two intersections near here at three-forty this morning. Headed toward downtown. It has to be her going to Kane’s office building.”

“He’ll take her somewhere else.” Jace didn’t slow down, didn’t sit, didn’t let himself do anything but move, because stopping meant facing exactly what he’d let happen on his watch. “I want satellite eyes on that building.”

Tucker didn’t argue, didn’t offer false comfort, only nodded and got back to work, which said more than any reassurance could have.

Gerri arrived within the hour, having apparently developed a supernatural instinct for exactly when catastrophe struck, surveyed the war room reassembling itself around her, and delivered her verdict.

“If she was going to walk into danger alone, the least she could have done was take snacks. Nobody thinks clearly on an empty stomach, and I raised that girl better than this, engagement or no engagement.” She set her bag down and rolled up her sleeves, all business beneath the complaint. “Now. Tell me what you need, and tell me fast. I have contacts who owe me a lot more favors than they’d like to admit.”

Roman muttered under his breath about rescue missions always getting more complicated once people fell in love, and how he’d have won considerably more of his own betting pool if he’d accounted for exactly this outcome months ago, back when the pool first started. Nobody had the energy to laugh at it.

EIGHTEEN

EMMA

The Chairman’s office looked like money that had given up trying to impress anyone, which Emma found far more unsettling than if he’d gone for obvious wealth instead. No art on the walls. No photographs. Only a desk, two chairs, and the kind of silence that came from a man who’d never once needed to fill a room with noise to be heard.

“Miss Burke.” He settled into a leather chair across from her. “I imagine Victor has told you nothing useful about me, which is exactly as I prefer it. Let me correct that.”

“Please. I’ve been dying to meet the architect.”

“Architect is generous. I prefer the word governor.” He folded his hands, doing a fair impression of reasonable patience. “Every pack, pride, and clan in this region depends on infrastructure it can’t see—land access, supply routes, emergency corridors. Control that infrastructure, and you control the outcome of every decision that matters without ever needing to sit at the head of a single table. I don’t want to rule anyone, Miss Burke. I want to be the thing nobody can function without. There’s a considerable difference, and I’d think a forensic accountant would appreciate the distinction.”

“I appreciate that you’ve spent years stealing from charities that feed children, house the elderly, and shelter women fleeing violence, all to build yourself a very expensive form of leverage.”

“Seed money. A regrettable necessity of scale.” He said it without a flicker of discomfort, the way most people discussed weather. “You’ll find, given time, that I’m not the monster this conversation wants to make me. I’m simply patient in a way most people never learn to be.”

“Patience is a virtue right up until it’s twenty years of laundering money. At that point, it’s only a very slow crime with excellent bookkeeping.”

Amusement crossed the Chairman’s face—not offense, closer to genuine delight, the reaction of a man who hadn’t been spoken to this plainly in longer than he could easily remember.

“Here’s what I need from you, Miss Burke. I want you to send a message to Gerri Wilder telling her that you fabricated the numbers and wrongly accused others.”