Steele’s Redemption

Chapter 12

Emma

The image on Nash's phone burned itself into me—a stranger's shape moving through my room, past my bed, past the box I hadn't even reached yet.

"Someone's in there right now," Nash said again, like saying it twice might change it.

Jake didn't reach for his phone or his temper. He reached for the door of the shop instead. "Inside. Both of you."

We followed him in, and the change in the building was immediate. Two guys near the lift straightened when they saw his face. Raven came out from the back office wiping her hands on a rag, took one look at him, and dropped whatever joke she'd been about to make.

"Lock the front," Jake said to her. "Nobody in or out who isn't already family. If Emma's name comes up from anyone outside these walls, you don't confirm, you don't deny, you call me."

"Done." She didn't ask why. She just did it, and something in that unquestioning trust told me more about him than anything he could have said.

He turned to one of the younger guys, barely into his twenties, still learning the ropes around the shop. "Tommy, you good on your own for twenty minutes if I step into the office?"

Tommy nodded fast, and Jake squeezed his shoulder once before walking past him—brief, easy, the kind of gesture that cost him nothing and meant something anyway. He wasn't performing calm for my benefit. He was calm, and it moved through the shop like weather.

In the office, he shut the door and finally looked at me.

"I need facts," he said. "Not to make you relive it. Just to know what we're working with. What's in that room that matters?"

I made myself think past the fear. "Clothes. Nothing valuable. The box under the bed—photos, my mom's ring, an old sketchbook. My name's not on the lease, Jake, I paid cash."

"Who knew the address?"

"You. Raven, because she dropped off my check once. The landlord." I stopped, feeling something cold settle in my stomach. "The clinic. I put it on the intake form."

"Anyone have a key besides you?"

"No. I never even gave the landlord a spare."

Jake didn't flinch, didn't accuse. "Then somebody either picked the lock, or somebody let them in. Either way, that's not your fault."

"It feels like it is." The words came out smaller than I meant them to. "I gave information to a clinic because I needed help. I told Raven where to drop something because I trusted her. If Derek's inside that room right now, it's because somewhere along the way I trusted the wrong thing."

"You trusted things that should have been safe," Jake said. "A clinic. A friend. A locked door. If any of those failed you, that's on the people or the systems that failed, not on you for needing medical care or a paycheck." His voice hardened at the edges. "I'm not going to let you carry guilt for somebody else's decision to sell information."

Nash knocked once and let himself in before either of us answered. "Manager's on the phone. Says whoever's inside isn't destroying things—they're documenting. Photos, it looks like."

"Building a file," Jake said, more to himself than to us.

"You want me to send someone over?"

"Not yet." Jake's eyes came back to me. "This is Emma's call. It's her room, her things, her risk if we go in loud. We can secure it like evidence and walk away untouched, or we can go get what matters to her and accept we might run into whoever's there."

"I don't want it treated like it doesn't matter," I said. "But I don't want anyone getting hurt over a sketchbook, either."

"Then we do it careful." He looked at Nash. "Two men, quiet, in and out. They don't touch anything but what Emma tells them to bring. If the door's locked when they get there, they wait for us instead of forcing it—I don't want this looking like we invaded anything ourselves. This stays clean."

Nash nodded and stepped out to make the call.

Jake exhaled, some of the discipline in his shoulders finally easing now that there was a plan instead of a void. "You okay?"

"I don't know what okay means anymore." I sat on the edge of his desk because my legs wanted to stop holding me up. "I keep thinking I built something small and safe, and it turns out it was never really mine to keep."

"It's still yours," he said. "Just because someone tried to reach into it doesn't mean it stopped belonging to you."

He didn't move closer, though I felt the pull of him the way I always did—steady, warm, more dangerous to my composure than any threat outside these walls. He didn't use the fear in the room to close the space between us. He just stood there, solid, letting me feel safe without asking for anything in return.

That, more than anything else, was what undid the last of my guardedness. Not the ink on his arms. Not the way men in this shop straightened when he walked past. It was this—the fact that his strength never once demanded something from me to exist.

Nash came back in holding his phone differently this time, angled down, his jaw tight.

"You need to see this," he said.

Jake took it. I watched his expression change from controlled to something colder.

"What is it?" I asked.

He turned the screen toward me, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

It was a photo—clearly taken inside my room, sent through some anonymous account Nash's guy had intercepted. Not the box. Not my clothes.

My nightstand. The paperback I'd left open, spine cracked, a receipt tucked in as a bookmark. The receipt from the clinic. My appointment time circled in someone else's handwriting.

Nobody outside that clinic and that room should have known which book I was reading, let alone the exact appointment slip I'd shoved between its pages without thinking twice.

"That's not something you get from a form," Jake said quietly. "That's something you get from being close. Really close."

The room tilted, just slightly. "Close like who?"

He didn't answer right away, and the silence told me he was already running through names in his head—names that included people I trusted, people who moved through my days without me ever suspecting them of anything.

"I don't know yet," he said finally. "But I intend to find out."

I looked at the photo again, at the small, private detail no stranger should have had access to, and understood with a chill that went deeper than fear: whoever was feeding Derek information wasn't watching me from a distance anymore.

They were already inside the life I thought I'd rebuilt.