Steele’s Redemption

Chapter 13

Emma

Nash took the phone back gently, like it might shatter, and set it face-down on the workbench between us. "I'm going to have someone go through everyone with clinic access. Staff, contractors, cleaning crew. It'll take a day, maybe two."

"You can't just interrogate Dr. Chen," I said. "She's the only doctor who's ever actually listened to me."

"Nobody's interrogating anybody." Jake leaned against the bench, arms crossed, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him even though we weren't touching. "We look at who had access to the information, not who we're accusing. Those are different things."

"How different, though, if it ends the same way?"

"Because one of them means we're careful with people's lives, and the other means we're not."

I studied him—the set of his jaw, the way his eyes stayed steady on me instead of drifting to Nash for backup. He meant it. That was the maddening thing about Jake Steele; he never said things just to calm me down.

"Okay," I said. "So who actually saw that receipt besides me?"

Nash pulled a notepad from his jacket, ready to write. "Walk me through the appointment. Start to finish."

I closed my eyes and let myself go back—the waiting room, the pale blue walls, the receptionist with the reading glasses on a beaded chain. "I checked in at the desk. There's usually two people rotating the front, but that day it was just one. Older woman, I don't know her name. Dr. Chen took me back herself, no nurse."

"No nurse," Jake repeated. "That's not usual?"

"No. Normally there's a nurse who does vitals first. That day she said the nurse called in sick, so Dr. Chen did the intake herself."

Nash's pen paused. "So on the one day nobody else touched your file, somebody still knew the exact time of your appointment and could photograph a receipt sitting in your book at home."

The implication sat between us, ugly and simple: it wasn't the clinic. It was someone with access to me directly—my apartment, my things, my life outside those walls.

My stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with the baby.

"That's not a stranger," I said quietly. "That's somebody who's been near me."

Jake didn't touch me. He never did that—not without asking first—but he shifted, just slightly, angling his body so he was between me and the shop's front windows without making it obvious that was what he'd done. Protective without crowding. I'd started noticing that about him, the small ways he made space feel safer instead of smaller.

"We'll get a list," he said. "Everyone who's been in that room since you moved—Raven, the guys doing security checks, the delivery guy who dropped off your groceries last week. Nobody's above being asked."

"Including you?" I said, half a challenge, half something softer.

His mouth curved, just barely. "Especially me. I've got motive and opportunity, if you want to get technical."

That surprised a small laugh out of me, cracked and short, but real. It felt strange to laugh in the middle of this, and stranger still that it was him who'd pulled it out of me.

Nash clicked his pen closed. "I'll start pulling the list together tonight. In the meantime, I don't love you staying anywhere predictable."

"The penthouse," Jake said, not a question so much as thinking aloud, and then he caught himself and looked at me. "If that still works for you. Your call."

Three weeks ago, no one had asked me if anything worked for me. Derek had simply decided, and I'd learned to disappear inside whatever he decided, fast enough that it barely registered as a choice being taken.

"It works," I said. "I'd rather be somewhere with you in it."

The words came out plainer than I meant them, and I watched something flicker behind his eyes—not smugness, not the look Derek used to get when he'd won something. Just quiet recognition, like he'd heard exactly what I meant and was choosing not to push on it.

Nash headed off to make calls, leaving the two of us in the half-lit shop, the smell of oil and metal settling into something almost peaceful now that the worst of the panic had drained out of the room.

"You okay?" Jake asked.

"No," I said honestly. "But I'm not falling apart, either. That's new."

"It's not new. You've been doing that the whole time. I've just been close enough to see it."

I don't know what made me do it—maybe the exhaustion, maybe the strange steadiness in his voice—but I reached out and closed my hand loosely around his forearm, feeling the tension in it, the warmth of skin under rolled sleeve.

He went very still. Not stiff, not pulling away—just careful, present, waiting.

"Is this okay?" I asked, because somewhere I'd learned that asking mattered, that consent wasn't just something owed to me but something I could offer, too.

"Yeah," he said, low. "It's okay."

We stood like that a moment, my hand on his arm, his eyes on mine, and I felt something crack open in my chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with how long it had been since anyone let me choose the distance between us.

"Emma." His voice had dropped, rougher at the edges. "I need you to know I'm not going to make this about anything but what you want. Not the room, not the baby, not any of it. You don't owe me closeness because I got you out."

"I know that." And I did, which was the strange part—the part that scared me more than Derek's men ever had. "I'm not doing this because I owe you. I'm doing it because I want to."

He exhaled slowly, like he'd been holding something in for longer than tonight. "Then we take it slow. However slow you need."

I let go of his arm before it could turn into more than either of us was ready for, but the warmth of it stayed printed against my palm the whole ride back to the penthouse, Nash's headlights trailing behind us, the city sliding past dark and watchful.

Somewhere out there, someone still knew things about me they had no right to know.

But for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn't only afraid.

I was also, unmistakably, *aware*—of him, of the space between us, of how careful he was to leave that space intact.

It terrified me almost as much as Derek ever had.

Almost.