Page 7 of Howl Lotta Love

Jace absorbed that in total silence, jaw locked, hands flat on the console like the only thing keeping them there was the effort of not putting them through it.

“Pull the badge ID. I want a name by morning.”

“Badge is registered to a vendor account that hasn’t been used in six months, boss. Whoever did this borrowed someone else’s access on purpose.” Keys clattered on the other end. “This was hours after she left. Somebody’s watching her already.”

Jace didn’t answer right away. Didn’t need to. A decision had already locked into place in his chest, clean and absolute, the kind he didn’t revisit once made.

“Nobody touches my client.”

Or my mate.

THREE

EMMA

Emma clocked the wrongness before she saw a single thing out of place.

Not a smell. Not a sound. Only a shift in the air, the kind you get when someone’s been standing where they shouldn’t. She’d registered it exactly twice before in seventeen years of this job, and both times had preceded a very bad afternoon. She set her coffee on the corner of her desk and did a slow lap of her own office, casing it the way she’d case a stranger’s.

Nothing broken. Nothing obviously missing. The conference table still held its usual disaster of ledgers, tax filings, wire logs, and donor reports—Gerri’s entire charitable empire, spread out exactly where Emma had left it. Except not quite. The left stack sat half an inch too far right. The Wilder Hope folder was closed, and Emma never closed that folder mid-case, not even for lunch. The whiteboard on the east wall—her evidence map, already dense with her own handwriting—hadn’t been touched at all.

That was the part that made her stomach drop. They hadn’t wanted her conclusions. They’d wanted her sources.

She crossed to the drawer, pulled it open slower than she needed to, and found the flash drive sitting exactly where she’d left it.

Still there. Untouched. That, more than an empty drawer ever could have, was what made her stomach turn over.

Nobody stole a flash drive anymore. Not when cloning one took ninety seconds and left it looking exactly as boring as it had that morning. She plugged it in, pulled the access log, and watched three months of donor records light up under a timestamp that wasn’t hers.

Forty minutes. That was the whole window—between the moment she’d stepped out for mid-morning coffee and the moment she’d walked back in—and someone had used it to let themselves into her office, sit down at her desk, and copy every file she had on the Wilder Hope fraud without breaking so much as a paperclip.

They’re not worried about getting caught. They’re worried about being slow.

She swept the rest of the office anyway—every drawer, every cabinet—and came up with nothing else touched. Only the files. Exactly the part that mattered, and wasn’t that a compliment she’d have gladly lived without.

Then she changed every password she owned. Email, cloud storage, the firm’s shared drive, her banking app for good measure. Paranoia had never gotten her killed. Complacency had a worse résumé.

She was three passwords deep when Gerri let herself in without knocking, a pastry box balanced on one hip, dressed for exactly this kind of morning and clearly proud of it.

“You’ve rearranged your desk.” Gerri set the box down and went very still, scanning the room once, twice. “No. You didn’t touch a thing. Someone else did, and did a mediocre job hiding it.”

“Nine seconds. New record.”

“Decades of practice reading rooms that lie to me.” Gerri’s voice stayed light. Her expression didn’t—sharp now, the look Emma was learning meant not amused, currently plotting. “Anything taken?”

“Nothing taken. Everything copied.”

“Which means they know exactly how close you’re getting.” Gerri opened the box, plucked out a croissant, and put it directly into Emma’s hand without asking whether she wanted it. “Eat. I’m sending someone.”

“Someone.”

“Best security firm in the city. Possibly the hemisphere. Run by a man I trust with my actual life, which is a shorter list than you’d think.” Gerri delivered it as settled fact, a decision she’d been sitting on for months, waiting for the right excuse, with only the paperwork left to finish. “He’ll be in touch.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard, Gerri. I need a better lock.”

“Darling, you need far more than a lock.” Gerri patted her cheek on the way out, several steps ahead of an argument Emma hadn’t finished building. “Eat the croissant. You look like you’re planning a murder, and while I fully support the impulse, it’s terrible for your pores.”

“Gerri—”