Page 61 of Howl Lotta Love

“Gerri isn’t going to believe that.” Emma didn’t bother hiding her disbelief. “I have no motive, and she’s spent decades learning to smell a lie.”

He smiled, unhurried. “You’re going to tell her you did it for fame and fortune. That you wanted to be somebody, and lying about a fraud you’d uncovered seemed like the fastest way there.”

Emma almost laughed in his face. The man had spent two decades studying human behavior closely enough to weaponize an entire charity circuit, and he still couldn’t imagine a person telling the truth for free. Gerri would see through the lie before she finished reading the first line.

“You’re delusional,” she replied. “I’m not doing anything you want.”

He rose, smoothing his jacket. “I do hope you reconsider your position on cooperation. It would spare everyone a great deal of unpleasantness, yourself included.”

“I’ll take my chances with the unpleasantness.”

“I suspected you might say that.” He didn’t sound disappointed. He sounded, if anything, faintly pleased, the reaction of someone who’d expected an intelligent opponent and found one exactly on schedule.

Emma kept her face carefully neutral and cataloged the room instead—two exits, one camera angle with a blind spot near the filing cabinet, a keycard reader that used the same color-coding as the hallway outside. Old habits. They didn’t care that she was currently somebody’s prisoner.

Victor Kane appeared in the doorway twenty minutes later, and the change in the room’s temperature was immediate.

“Sir,” he said to the Chairman, “the rescue team hasn’t located this facility. Our security remains⁠—”

“Your security failed to prevent a woman from stealing a laptop filled with data, failed to prevent Walter Pierce from delivering evidence before he died, and failed, spectacularly, to secure a single parcel of contested land despite months of preparation.” The Chairman didn’t raise his voice, which made the words land a great deal harder than shouting would have. “I begin to wonder, Victor, whether seed money was the only thing I miscalculated.”

Kane’s jaw tightened, a muscle jumping once beneath the practiced warmth he usually wore like a second suit. “I’ve handled every obstacle this operation has faced.”

“You’ve created most of them.” The Chairman rose and straightened one cufflink with the fastidious calm of a man discussing quarterly earnings instead of two decades of partnership fraying in real time. “See that Miss Burke is comfortable. I’ll want to speak with her again once she’s had time to consider her situation.”

He left without another glance at either of them, and Kane’s composure cracked enough, in the half-second before he caught it, for Emma to see exactly how thin it had worn.

Kane rounded on her the moment the door clicked shut, all his usual charm burned off wholly. “You find this entertaining.”

“I find it educational. I didn’t realize the man running your entire empire also treats you like an intern he’s disappointed in.” Emma kept her voice light, testing exactly how much pressure the crack could take. “How long has that been happening? Twenty years? Longer?”

“You don’t know anything about the arrangement.”

“I know enough. I know you took the public credit for the philanthropy and he took the actual power, and now that it’s collapsing, you’re the one standing in a room getting lectured while he walks away clean.” She watched the words land, watched his jaw tighten further. “That must be a considerably worse deal than you signed up for.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. His silence told her everything, and she tucked it away with the same care she gave every other fact she’d logged since walking through the door.

There. That’s the crack.

They put her in a windowless room two floors down, comfortable in a way that meant someone had planned for a long stay rather than a short one—a bed, a chair, a bathroom with the mirror removed, and a ventilation grate loose enough at one corner that Emma noticed it within the first ten minutes.

She waited until the guard’s rotation shifted, memorized his pattern, and worked the grate free with the edge of a hairpin she’d hidden in her collar before leaving. She had Walter’s documents half out of her jacket lining when footsteps stopped directly outside her door instead of continuing past.

The lock turned.

Emma shoved the papers behind the grate and dropped into the chair in one motion, breathing hard, heart slamming, a full three seconds from being caught with the one piece of evidence that could bury this entire conspiracy.

The guard glanced in, saw a woman sitting quietly, and moved on without a word.

Emma sat with her hands folded until her heartbeat stopped roaring in her ears, then finished the job with fingers that refused to stop shaking for another full minute.

If they end me before Jace finds me, at least the truth survives.

She spent the next several hours doing the only thing she knew how to do under pressure: gathering information. She counted footsteps in the hallway to estimate guard spacing. She noted meal delivery times, badge colors, the distinct squeak one hinge made that told her exactly when the door two rooms down opened. A young guard brought her water at what she clocked as the two-hour mark, nervous in a way that suggested he hadn’t done this long, and Emma memorized his face too, on the theory that every piece of information might matter eventually.

“You don’t have to look so worried,” she told him. “I’m not going to bite.”

“Wolves bite,” he said, entirely serious, and left before she could point out that she, in fact, wasn’t a wolf.