My Contract Husband

Chapter 17: Floor Four

The building was the kind that used to be somebody's pride and was now just somebody's alibi — a converted warehouse with a lobby that still had its original brass fixtures and a smell that suggested nobody had mopped since the Clinton administration.

"Charming," Emma whispered, pressed against the loading dock wall beside Alexander. "Very 'secret evil real estate portfolio' energy."

"It's a holding company. Three shells deep. Daniel's name isn't on anything." Alexander was scanning the service entrance, jaw tight. "Which means whoever set this up knew exactly how he liked to hide things."

"So either someone from inside your family—"

"Emma."

"I'm not naming anyone." She held up both hands. "I promised myself I wouldn't guess out loud until we actually know. I just refuse to pretend I don't have a top three."

"You have a top three?"

"I have a top three, a ranked list, and a corkboard in my head with string on it. Focus, please."

The service door was propped a careless two inches open — someone's small, sloppy mistake, the kind four in the morning makes for people who've been awake too long to be careful. Alexander eased it wider. The stairwell beyond was unlit except for a single emergency bulb, humming its one flat red note into the dark.

"Four floors," Emma breathed. "No elevator. Fantastic. I'm wearing motel-adjacent shoes."

"You said I owed you new ones."

"I said *after.* Right now I need these to not fall off while I sneak up four flights of stairs to rescue our daughter from your family's discount evil lair."

"It's not *my* family's lair, it's—"

"Alexander. I love you. Climb the stairs."

He went quiet in a way she felt more than saw — the word *love,* dropped so casually in the middle of a sentence about stairs, landing somewhere neither of them had time to examine. He reached back without looking and found her hand in the dark, squeezed it once, and started up.

They didn't talk again until the second floor landing, where a sound stopped them both cold — not a footstep, not a voice. A baby's cry, small and furious and unmistakably alive, filtering down through the stairwell from somewhere above.

Emma's whole body went to that sound like a compass finding north. "That's her. Alexander, that's *her.*"

"I know." His voice had gone rough. "I know, come on—"

They took the last two flights faster than was safe, faster than was smart, and burst onto the fourth floor into a corridor lined with old office doors, half of them hanging open onto empty rooms full of dust sheets and abandoned furniture. The crying was louder now, coming from the third door on the left.

Alexander went for it. Emma grabbed his sleeve.

"Wait. If this was easy, it's a trap. If it's a trap, you charging in first is the worst possible plan, because you're the one they actually want dead."

"You want *you* to go first?"

"I want us to not be idiots about this." She was already moving, low and quiet, toward the door. "You're rich and dramatic. I'm annoying and hard to kill. It's a whole thing people say about me at board meetings."

"Nobody says that about you."

"They say it *behind* me. I have excellent hearing."

The door wasn't locked. Emma pushed it open with two fingers, ready for anything — men with guns, a trap, Daniel's ghost rising up to say *I told you so* from beyond a prison sentence he was currently very much alive to be serving.

What she got was Marissa, sitting cross-legged on a dust sheet with Hope in her arms, one shoe missing, hair wild, looking up at them with the calm, faintly murderous expression of a woman who had had an extremely long night and intended to bill someone for it.

"You're late," Marissa said.

Emma made a sound she would later describe, when telling this story at parties, as *not a sob, more of a structural collapse,* and crossed the room in three steps to take her daughter, who immediately stopped crying, blinked up at her, and burped with the profound satisfaction of someone who had been personally inconvenienced and wanted that on the record.

"Hi," Emma whispered into the baby's hair, voice wrecked. "Hi, hi, hi, I've got you, I've got you—"

"She's fine," Marissa said, standing with a wince and rubbing her jaw. "Fed, changed, mildly outraged about the whole affair, very her mother's daughter. I, however, have a bite mark on my own hand from a struggle I will be discussing in therapy for the next decade."

"You bit a man to save our daughter," Alexander said, already shrugging out of his jacket to put around Marissa's shoulders, "and then apparently bit *yourself* as well? I need the full timeline."

"It's a long night, Mr. Carter."

"They just left you here?" Emma asked, scanning the room — no guards, no captors, just Marissa, the baby, and a folding chair someone had clearly been sitting in not long ago, coffee cup still sweating a ring onto the floor beside it.

"That's the part I don't love," Marissa said, lowering her voice. "About twenty minutes ago, somebody got a phone call. I didn't hear the voice, just the guy's side. He went pale, said *'understood,'* and then they just — packed up. Left the door propped. Left us. Like somebody upstairs decided the plan changed."

Emma and Alexander looked at each other over the top of Hope's head.

"Somebody called it off," Alexander said slowly.

"Or somebody *else* called it off," Emma said. "Which is worse, actually, if you think about it. It means whoever's really in charge here isn't even the person giving the orders in the room."

"I am begging you both," Marissa said, "to have this realization somewhere with coffee. And chairs that haven't been sat in by criminals."

They left the way they came, moving fast but no longer running — the kind of fast that comes from relief instead of fear, which Emma decided was a genuinely different muscle group, because her legs felt like jelly the second the adrenaline had somewhere safe to go. Hope dozed against her shoulder, one small fist curled into the collar of Emma's shirt like she intended to keep her exactly there, permanently, no further discussion.

In the car, Marissa asleep in the back seat before they'd even left the block, Alexander drove with one hand and reached over with the other to rest it, very lightly, on Emma's knee — not asking, just there, the way you touch something to make sure it's real.

"You said you loved me," he said, eyes on the road. "On the stairs."

"I was under duress. It doesn't count."

"It counted enough that I climbed four flights of stairs at a dead sprint."

"You'd have done that for the *stairs,* Alexander, you're extremely competitive with buildings."

"Emma."

She looked over. In the dashboard light, he looked wrecked and relieved and about eleven years younger than he had at the top of the stairwell, and something in her chest that had been braced all night finally, quietly, let go.

"Yeah," she said. "I meant it. God help me."

"God help both of us," he said, and for the first time since the fire escape, since the trial, since the whole impossible year that had started as a business arrangement and turned into this — he smiled, the real one, the one that didn't have a boardroom in it anywhere.

"Ask me again when we're not covered in stairwell dust and motel despair," Emma said, closing her eyes, Hope's small weight warm against her. "I'll say it again. I'm not going anywhere."

"Good," Alexander said. "Because we still haven't finished our fight."

"Tomorrow," Emma murmured, already half asleep. "Fight me tomorrow. Tonight I'm just going to be happy."

Behind them, unseen, a car that had been parked across the street for the last two hours pulled quietly away in the opposite direction — nobody's headlights catching the driver's face, nobody thinking to look.