Why would Emma stay while the manager left? Could Emma own the bakery? It made sense. Gordon had a lot of money and an obsession with status. If he was going to put his daughter up somewhere, he’d make sure she was the owner. The thought was enough to wake him up. He couldn’t allow himself to be lulled by the sleepy seaside front she’d created.
Zach made his way across to a recessed doorway and pulled the growing Shadows into his hands before sending them drifting around his body until he was a gray blur hidden from all eyes. Then he turned to watch the bakery, expecting Emma to follow soon after her colleagues. But minutes turned into hours, and she didn’t appear. The sun set and a chilly wind blew in from the sea.
Zach grew colder and hungrier and more and more irritated as he huddled in the doorway. He almost wished he’d eaten the croissant and been done with it. Maybe he would have poisoned himself, but at least he wouldn’t be so bloody hungry. What the hell was Emma doing?
His thoughts drifted back to Wales. What was James doing? Was he awake? Was he busy planning his next betrayal? Or was he growing sicker? Was he screaming through the night? What was Gordon doing while Zach stood in the darkness achieving nothing? The helplessness ate at him.
It was nearly nine o’clock when Emma appeared at the door. She looked up and down the street before turning to lock up. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind, loose strands of hair flying free, and his first thought was of how tired she looked. How lonely. His second thought was how vulnerable she was standing outside her bakery, all alone on a dark street, not even realizing that she was being watched.
The need to protect her surged through him and he pushed it away ruthlessly. He wasn’t there to defend her. He was there to find out what the fuck she was doing. The fact that he’d even thought it pissed him off. Hell, she probably had enough blood Shadows in that locket of hers that she could simply command an attacker to leave her alone.
Emma strode away into the darkness and he resisted the urge to follow her to her car. She was fine. And she wasn’t his problem.
Instead, he counted down another five minutes to be absolutely certain she was gone. Then he slipped down the road, formed a Shadow key, and let himself into the bakery. An alarm immediately started to beep, and he eyed the keypad with annoyance.
He typed in Emma’s birthday, but the alarm just kept on counting down, blaring out a piercing warning tone that he couldn’t ignore. Not her birthday—then whose? He tried a date that he thought could be her mother’s birthday. The same year as his mother, a couple of weeks before Christmas… the twelfth? The beeping continued. Sounding even louder, more strident. How long before it timed out and the alarm blared in earnest? He guessed he only had one more try. What the fuck would she have chosen?
His memory filled with the look on her face when she saw him in her bakery. The soft, stunned joy in her voice. Would she have…? No. It wasn’t possible. The beeping raised in pitch. Any second now, the alarm would start to blare. Then there would be security, maybe even police. Emma would be called. Fuck it. He typed in his own birthday.
The beeping stopped and a green light flashed. He was in. What the hell?
Zach’s Shadows churned in his belly, writhing around emotions he couldn’t even begin to name. He took a breath, held it for the count of three, and then released it slowly. It didn’t mean anything. It was a random number she’d thought no one would ever guess.
Zach stretched his neck from side to side, trying to release the building tension, and then made his way through the dark bakery, past the little tables, the gleaming counters, and the display cabinets. The kitchen was pitch dark, and he risked turning on the torch of his phone rather than stumbling into something hot as he stalked over to the tiny office at the back.
The bakery smelled like heaven, rich and sweet, and his mouth watered as he picked the lock and let himself inside. The office held a battered desk, a tall filing cabinet, a chair, and not much else. Zach formed a Shadow key, opened all the locked drawers, and set about reading the files.
Within an hour, he was hopelessly confused. The bakery was indeed Emma’s. But it was only just moving out of debt for the first time since it opened. She’d bought everything with loans. And not great loans either. She had high interest rates and an array of nasty little fees that she would never have faced if someone had put the money up for her. If Gordon was involved, she should have been able to get a much better deal. Hell, if Gordon was involved, she shouldn’t have needed a loan in the first place. Meanwhile, Emma had employed her manager less than a year before, and her two students had only been on the payroll for a few months. What the hell had she done before she had help?
Emma was organized and obviously a bit obsessed with record-keeping. Which was saying a lot coming from a man who ran the administration for the Order.
She had everything neatly labeled and carefully filed going back to the receipts from when she’d first arrived in Swanage. She even had the bakery staff schedule for every single week going back three years. Zach spread the file open on her desk. The vast majority of hours were Emma’s. The staff salary file backed up the schedules. How on earth was she working a hundred-hour week and fitting in trips to London on the side? How did she manage visions for Gordon on top of everything?
Zach leaned back in Emma’s chair and massaged the sides of his head. It didn’t make sense. Everything he’d read told him that she was exactly what she appeared to be. A woman working hard to build a business.
Maybe Emma was just that good? Elizabeth managed her visions around her packed teaching schedule for the college, as well as raising first her son and then Kay on her own. Surely Emma could do the same.
Maybe she was even using the blood Shadows to force visions somehow. She could do that at a distance and simply phone Gordon with updates whenever she wanted. That would explain why her Shadows were so broken. Or maybe she’d already done something truly awful, destroyed her Shadows, and now she was living here in hiding. Just like James. God.
Zach put Emma’s office back the way he’d found it, reset the alarm—with his own bloody birthday—and silently let himself out of The Holly Tree.
He’d have to go back in the morning with a new plan. He had to figure out what was going on. And that meant getting far closer to Emma. Fuck it all.
By the time Zach was back outside the bakery door the next day, his shoulders had bunched into concrete and his eyes were gritty. Everything about this felt wrong.
He took a breath and reminded himself of what Kay had looked like lying broken on the hospital floor. What James had sounded like screaming as the blood Shadows were leached from his body. He was going to stop Gordon no matter what it took.
Zach forced himself to smile, lower his shoulders, and at least try to look like he was relaxed as he opened the door. He took his usual order from the woman he’d thought was the manager—Becky, according to her name tag—and made his way to a small table next to a window. He pulled out his phone and sent a few e-mails while other customers came and went.
He sensed Emma before she reached him. There was no way to deny the sudden upheaval in his Shadows. The way they swam and dived, reached out and flinched back. It was as unsettling as hell.
He tightened his mental walls, ensuring he wouldn’t have to see her Shadows, and looked up as Emma came to stand behind the chair opposite him. “Morning.”
She smiled back more confidently than on the previous days. “Bore da.”
God. Now she was speaking Welsh. It was as if she was actively trying to force him back into his childhood. He forced out a chuckle. “You remember some Welsh, then.”
She shrugged. “Some.” She glanced down at the untouched food and coffee on his table and wrinkled her nose. “It’s getting cold. Do you want me to bring you a refill?”
