My Contract Husband

Chapter 15: Round 6

The fire escape rattled under their feet, metal groaning with every step down.

Above them, the penthouse windows lit up orange for half a second — a muzzle flash, maybe, or someone kicking through the study door — and then went dark again.

"Don't look up," Alexander said, gripping her hand so tight it hurt. "Just move."

Emma's bare feet were bleeding by the third landing. She didn't feel it yet. She would later.

"Of all the nights to skip the heels," she muttered, half-hysterical, "I finally pick the practical shoes."

"You're not wearing shoes at all."

"I said what I said."

They hit the alley behind the tower at a dead run. Alexander's car — not the sleek black one with the company plates, but a battered gray sedan Emma had never once seen him drive — was parked exactly where a man who'd spent ten years afraid of this night would leave it. Already facing the exit. Already unlocked.

"You planned this," Emma said, breathless, sliding into the passenger seat.

"I hoped I'd never need to." Alexander threw the car into gear before his door was even shut. "That's not the same thing."

"Also this car smells like gym socks. Is this your secret backup criminal car or your secret backup teenage-boy car?"

"It was cheap and forgettable. That was the point."

"Mission accomplished. I'm forgetting it already."

They peeled out into the empty street. No sirens yet. No black SUVs in the mirrors. Just the wet shine of streetlights on asphalt and Emma's heart trying to climb out of her throat.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

Alexander's jaw tightened. "Where's the safest place you can think of, Emma?"

And she knew immediately, and the knowing terrified her more than the gunshots had.

"No," she said. "No, you don't get to — that's not your right to even think about right now."

"I've known for eight months," Alexander said quietly. "I've known since the day you disappeared for a weekend and came back with milk stains on a shirt you tried to hide in the laundry hamper. I never said anything because I didn't know if you trusted me enough to tell me yourself."

"I balled that shirt up so well."

"You did not. It was folded. You folded a milk-stained shirt and put it under the towels like a criminal mastermind who'd never actually committed a crime before."

Despite everything, a small, wrecked laugh escaped her. "I panicked, okay? I'm new at this."

"I know." He reached over without looking away from the road and squeezed her hand once. "I have never once gone near her, Emma. I swore I wouldn't, not until you were ready to tell me yourself. But if Daniel's people are already inside our home, they'll look for exactly what I just described. A weekend. A hidden shirt. A woman who disappears and comes back different."

The blood left Emma's face. "They'll go to Marissa's."

"They might already have."

Emma grabbed her phone with shaking hands and dialed the nanny's number. It rang once. Twice. On the fourth ring, a voice picked up — not Marissa's soft, careful voice, but rougher. Older. A stranger's.

"Looking for someone?" the voice said.

Emma's stomach turned to ice water. "Where is she. Where is my daughter."

"Safe," the voice said, almost bored. "For now. Depends how fast you get here. Depends whether you bring him."

"Don't hurt her," Emma said, hating how her voice cracked on the word *her*, giving away everything she'd spent eight months hiding.

"Wasn't planning to," the voice said. "Boss just wants a family reunion. Sentimental guy, our boss. Even from a cell."

The line went dead.

Emma looked at Alexander, and for the first time since she'd met him — through the contract, through the wedding neither of them had wanted, through the year that had somehow turned real — she saw him afraid.

"They have her," Emma said.

"Then we go get her." Something moved under his voice she hadn't heard before. Not the CEO. Not the husband. A father, out loud, for the first time.

He turned the car north toward the old warehouse district, where Marissa kept a small apartment above a bakery that had never once seemed suspicious in eight months of Emma visiting under a fake name and, on one memorable occasion, a wig so bad Marissa had physically had to stop herself from taking a photo.

"You told me that wig was undetectable," Alexander said, apparently needing something to say with his hands white on the wheel.

"It WAS undetectable. Marissa just has good eyes."

"Marissa said, and I quote, 'it looked like a raccoon lost a fight.'"

"Marissa," Emma said, "is fired the second this is over. Lovingly. But fired."

The joke didn't last. Emma's phone buzzed on her lap, and the small warm thing in her chest went cold again before she'd even read it.

`You found out about the baby faster than I expected.

Alexander, you've gotten good at secrets.

I should know. I taught you.

- A Friend`

Emma read it twice. "Alexander. They said they taught you how to keep secrets."

Alexander's knuckles went white. "There's only one person who ever taught me anything about secrets. And he's supposed to be in a maximum-security prison two hundred miles from here."

"Daniel's in prison. I watched them take him away."

"I know what I watched. But someone is running this from outside those walls, and it isn't random. Prisoners get phone calls, Emma. Prisoners get visitors. Prisoners get lawyers who carry in more than paperwork, if you pay the right people enough."

They pulled up two blocks from the bakery and killed the headlights.

"Stay low," Alexander whispered.

"You say that like I'm planning to stroll in whistling."

"You hummed show tunes during the boardroom fire drill last spring. I'm covering my bases."

"That was ONE TIME and it was a very stressful fire drill."

They moved along the wall in the dark, past the shuttered bakery, toward the narrow side stairs to Marissa's apartment. The door at the top was open. Just slightly. Just enough.

Alexander stopped Emma with one arm.

"Let me go first."

"She's my daughter."

"She's *ours*," Alexander said, and the word landed somewhere deep and unhealed in Emma's chest, "and I am not losing either of you tonight. Please."

Emma nodded, throat too tight to argue, and let him.

The stairs creaked. The door swung open the rest of the way, revealing a dark hallway, a lamp knocked sideways, and silence so complete Emma could hear her own pulse.

"Marissa?" Alexander called softly.

Nothing.

Emma pushed past him and ran for the nursery door at the end of the hall — the one with hand-painted stars she'd chosen herself, sitting cross-legged on this floor eight months ago with a brush too small for the job, because she'd wanted, more than anything, for one room in the world to feel safe.

The door was ajar. The crib was empty.

A single folded note sat where a sleeping child should have been.

`Round 6 has a name now.

Her name is Hope, isn't it? Fitting.

Come alone if you want to keep it that way.

You have six hours.

- A Friend`

Behind her, Alexander made a sound she'd never heard from him before — something between a growl and a sob, something that didn't belong to a man who negotiated hundred-million-dollar contracts without blinking.

"They knew her name," Emma whispered.

Alexander took the note and read it twice, his face moving through grief, and fury, and the particular helplessness of realizing you've spent your whole life being powerful in exactly the wrong ways.

"Six hours," he said quietly.

"To do what?"

He looked at her — and underneath the fear, Emma caught something else. The ghost of the man who, an hour ago in a burning-pasta kitchen, had sworn he'd watched a YouTube video and this time would be different.

"To finally get something right," he said. "For once in my life."

Emma almost laughed — the wrong kind of laugh, the kind that shows up when a person has run out of other places to put their feelings.

"If you 'get it right' by getting us both killed," she said, "I am haunting you so hard you'll wish Daniel had finished the job."

"Noted," Alexander said, and for one flickering second, in the middle of the worst night of both their lives, he almost smiled. "Try not to hum show tunes while we do it."