Steele’s Redemption

Chapter 11

Jake

Nash didn't say anything until we were both out of the truck and Emma was standing between us, arms crossed against the cold.

"Tell me what you actually know," I said. "Not what you're guessing."

"Fair." He rubbed a hand over his jaw. "Guy showed up at Emma's building forty minutes ago. Talked to the manager again, but this time he wasn't fishing. He had specifics."

"What kind of specifics?"

"Room number." Nash's eyes flicked to Emma, then back to me. "Said it like he already knew it. Manager got spooked, called it in the second the guy left."

The lot went quiet except for the wind pushing trash against the fence.

"That's not something you get from asking around," I said.

"No. It's not."

Emma's arms tightened around herself. "Nobody publishes room numbers. Not to strangers."

"No," Nash agreed. "Which means somebody told him. Or somebody looked it up."

I watched her face for the shutdown—the blank, faraway look she got when fear started closing doors in her head. It didn't come. She stayed with us, jaw tight, eyes sharp.

"Okay," I said. "Let's slow down before we start guessing at who. Emma—did you tell anyone the room number? Landlord, coworker, anyone from before?"

"No." She said it fast, then caught herself and thought about it harder. "I wrote it down once. On an intake form at the clinic. For contact information."

"Who has access to that?"

"Front desk. Dr. Chen. I don't know who else."

"That's not your fault," I said, before the shame could finish crawling across her face. "You gave your address to a medical office because that's what medical offices ask for. That's not a mistake. That's how the system's built."

"But if someone there—"

"Then we find out," Nash said. "Quietly. I'm not accusing anybody yet. Could be a records clerk who talks too much at a bar. Could be nothing to do with the clinic at all. Could be your neighbor's cousin knows somebody who knows Derek. People leak information in more ways than you'd think, and most of the time it's not malice, it's carelessness."

"Or it's someone closer than that," I said, thinking about the mail-forwarding cancellation Nash had turned up days ago. Two pieces, both requiring information nobody should've had without effort.

Emma looked between us. "You think somebody's feeding him information on purpose."

"I think it's worth considering," I said. "I'm not going to tell you it's true, because I don't know that yet. I'm telling you what we need to rule out."

She nodded slowly, absorbing it instead of drowning in it. That was the thing about her—she took information like a person building something, not a person being buried.

"So what do we do," she said, "about the room."

"That's the question," I said. "You've got a few options, and none of them are me deciding for you. We can hold the lease, put a camera on the door, have someone watch the building. We can walk away from it entirely—forfeit the deposit, never go back. Or something in between, where you go get what matters to you, and we never use that address again after today."

"What would you do?" she asked.

"Doesn't matter what I'd do. It's not my room."

The corner of her mouth almost moved. "You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

She looked past me, toward the shop, like she was picturing the room itself—the narrow bed, the thin walls, the version of safety she'd built out of almost nothing. "I don't want to go back there. Not to live. But there's a box under the bed. Photos. Things from before Derek, from before all of it. I want those."

"Then we get them," I said. "Not you alone. Not tonight, if it feels wrong to move fast. But we get them."

"Tonight," she said. "I don't want to keep waiting on things that scare me. I've done enough of that."

Nash was already pulling out his phone, calling in two more guys, running through logistics under his breath—entry, exit, who watches the street, who watches the stairs. I let him work. It was easier to think when somebody else was handling movement and I could focus on the part that mattered more.

"Emma." I waited until she looked at me. "Whatever we find out about how he got that number—it doesn't change anything about what you did to survive him. You didn't hand him a key. You gave your address to a doctor's office because you needed a doctor. That's not the same thing as being careless."

"Feels the same," she said quietly. "Feels like I keep leaving trails without meaning to."

"You're not leaving trails. He's got money and patience and people willing to take it. That's on him, not you." I kept my voice even, kept my hands where they were instead of reaching for her, because comfort right now would've been about me needing to touch her, not about what she needed. "You didn't create this. You're just the one dealing with the fallout."

She held my eyes a second longer than usual, and something passed between us that had nothing to do with Derek or rooms or informants—something that lived underneath all of it, quiet and complicated and not going anywhere no matter how much I tried to keep it in its lane. I was her boss. Her landlord, in every way that mattered. The man who'd found her bleeding on a sidewalk three weeks ago. None of that made whatever I felt simple, and none of it made acting on it right, not yet, maybe not for a long time.

Nash's phone buzzed, cutting through it.

He read the screen, and his whole posture changed.

"What," I said.

"Camera feed just came online at the building. Property manager finally got us access." He turned the phone so I could see it, and the bottom dropped out of the moment.

The hallway outside Emma's door. The door standing open. A shape moving inside the room that wasn't hers.

"Someone's in there right now," Nash said.

Emma went rigid beside me, staring at the small gray image like it might reach through the screen.

"That's not us," I said slowly. "Nobody from our end has a key."

"Then who's in my room," Emma whispered.

Nobody answered her, because none of us knew—and that silence said more than anything I could've told her.