Page 68 of Howl Lotta Love

The world went white, then gold, then wholly, permanently rearranged.

Warmth flooded through her with no clean edges, no beginning she could point to, only the sudden, total knowledge of him settling into her chest like he’d always belonged there. His relief registered plainly, distinct from her own. So did his love, woven through hers so completely she couldn’t find the seam.

He licked gently over the bite mark, soothing it, and gathered her against his chest, both of them shaking.

“I feel you,” she whispered, wondering, tears she hadn’t expected slipping free. “I don’t have a framework for this. I only feel you, like you’ve always been there.”

“I have been.” His voice came thick. “You only didn’t have the bond yet to know it.”

Rescue helicopters found the ranger cabin an hour after dawn, the storm finally, fully broken, and Emma woke fully bonded to a world gone entirely different in ways she had no vocabulary for.

Gerri met them at the medical tent, took one look at the mark blooming dark and unmistakable at Emma’s shoulder, and threw both hands in the air, triumphant, as though she’d won a bet nobody else knew she’d placed.

“FINALLY.” Her voice carried across the entire tent, several federal agents turning to stare. “Do you have any idea how long I have been waiting for that mark to show up? I matched you two before either of you could spell your own feelings, and you took your sweet time getting here, and I am simply thrilled, and I would also like it noted, publicly and permanently, that I am never wrong, not once, not ever.”

“Gerri—”

“I’m not finished.” She jabbed a finger at Jace’s chest. “You. Mopey. Broody. Four years of telling me you didn’t need a match before I finally shoved a photograph in your face. You owe me a fruit basket the size of a small car.” The finger swung to Emma. “You. I liked you within seconds of meeting you, which is a personal record, and I would like a thank-you card.” She threw her arms around them both at once, fierce and quick. “I’m so glad you’re both alive. Get in the helicopter before I start crying in front of federal agents, which isn’t the reputation I’ve spent decades building.”

Jace Maddox

The weeks that followed moved fast in the way recovery always did—slow when you were living it, a blur in hindsight.

Emma worked with federal investigators from a hospital bed for the first three days and from Maddox Command for the two weeks after that, cataloging evidence with the same relentless precision she’d brought to every ledger since this entire war began. Kane and the Chairman both faced indictment on charges that filled several pages—though the indictment listed the Chairman only by the alias he’d used to open his first shell company. Even federal prosecutors, Tucker reported with some disgust, hadn’t managed to find his real name. Twenty years of patience apparently bought a man that much, even in handcuffs.

The Chairman’s real name never surfaced. But another name did, and it hit the room harder than the Chairman’s silence ever could have.

“Corbin.” Tucker turned the monitor around, three shell layers peeled back on-screen, a face Emma recognized from a boardroom table not too long ago.

“Board credentials at Wilder Hope gave him legitimate-looking access to the shared security channel we use to coordinate with Gerri’s foundation. He’d been skimming our briefing traffic since sometime after the Kane Foundation gala—small stuff, nothing we’d have caught at the time.”

His jaw tightened. “That’s also how Kane’s people knew the Riverside archive layout cold the night they torched it. Corbin pulled the campus schematics off that same channel two weeks earlier, filed under a routine security review nobody thought twice about.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Roman set down the sandwich he’d been eating and didn’t pick it back up.

“Get Gerri,” Jace said finally. “She needs to hear this from us before she hears it from a courtroom.”

Gerri arrived within the hour, and she read the file standing up, in silence, all the way through twice, while Emma and Jace waited without offering to make it easier for her.

“Nine years.” She finally set the folder down, very precisely, on the center of the table. “I sat across from that man at a hundred board meetings. I gave him access I don’t give my own accountant.” Her voice hadn’t risen at all, which was somehow worse than if it had. “I trusted him because trusting people is the entire reason any of this works, and I have never once regretted it before tonight.”

“Gerri—”

“I’m not finished.” She held up one hand, and for the first time since Emma had known her, there wasn’t a joke waiting behind it. “You’ve wondered—I’ve watched you both wonder, since the very beginning—why a woman with my resources hired one forensic accountant out of a walk-up office instead of a firm with a marble lobby and a dozen names on the letterhead.”

She looked at Emma directly. “Because I stopped trusting rooms with a dozen names in them long before Corbin. Big firms leak. Somebody always owes somebody a favor, and favors are how men like Victor Kane get a foot in the door. I went looking for one person nobody would think to compromise, because nobody thinks a one-woman operation is worth compromising until it’s too late to stop her.” Her mouth curved, thin and proud despite everything. “I was right about you. I only wish I’d been wrong about him.”

She had Corbin removed from every board she controlled by the end of the week—no press statement, no public accounting, only a single line struck from a letterhead and a silence that outlasted the gossip. It was, Emma understood, the closest thing to a eulogy the betrayal was ever going to get out of her.

Farraday took a plea deal inside the month, and Whitmore and Alderidge both resigned their board seats within days of each other rather than wait to be pushed. Dozens more embedded accountants went down alongside Kane, the Chairman, and Corbin—exposed by exactly the kind of patient, thorough work Emma had built her entire career on.

Frozen charity accounts thawed. The clinic reopened its doors within a month. The scholarship fund Gerri had been quietly panicking about for weeks was fully restored, along with every other organization that had nearly collapsed under twenty years of patient theft.

Emma personally called three separate program directors only to hear their voices when she told them the money was coming back, and Jace watched her cry happy tears at his kitchen table more than once, never once minding how many times it happened. Nina’s family got the truth and a formal federal commendation for her bravery and sacrifice—the first thing Emma made sure of, before anything else on the list.

“This is what it was for,” she told him, wiping her eyes and laughing at herself in the same breath. “This exact thing. I forget sometimes, in the middle of all the danger, that the whole point was always this.”

He kissed her temple and didn’t correct the tears, because some things didn’t need correcting.