Steele’s Redemption

Chapter 19

Emma

"Not a stranger" hung in the air longer than it should have.

"Say that part again," I said. "About the timing."

Nash turned his phone so I could read it myself. Legal jargon blurred together until I found the line—*patient's initial consultation, confirmed 9:15 AM, March 3rd*—and my stomach dropped through the floor of the shop.

"That's the exact time Sophia's calendar system sent the confirmation," I said. "Not the clinic's. The clinic just says 'morning appointment' on their end. Sophia's system logs the minute."

Nash's eyes flicked to Jake, then back to me. "You're sure?"

"I set up the account myself. I remember complaining that it was too specific." I swallowed. "That doesn't mean it's her. It means her calendar is where the leak came from. Somebody with access to it, or a way into it."

"Could be a hack," Jake said. "Could be somebody watching over her shoulder. Could be a dozen things that aren't Sophia sitting in a room deciding to sell me out."

"I know," I said. "I'm not accusing her. I'm telling you where to look."

Nash was already typing. "I'll pull login times, IP addresses, whatever her system tracks. If it's remote access, we'll see it."

"And until then," I said, "nobody gets calendar invites with real information. Codes only. If it's not the four of us in a locked room, it doesn't get the actual time or place."

Jake looked at me for a second too long, like he was recalibrating something.

"That's a good call," he said.

"I have good calls sometimes," I said, and it came out sharper than I meant, tired more than proud.

---

By the time we got back to the penthouse, my body had run out of adrenaline to run on. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand flat against my stomach, the way I'd started doing without noticing I was doing it.

Nothing to feel yet. Just the idea of something.

Jake knocked on the doorframe, two knuckles, soft. "You want company or space?"

"Company," I said. "But I need to say some things out loud, and I need you to just let me say them."

He sat in the chair across from the bed instead of beside me, which I noticed, and was grateful for.

"I don't know if I can do this," I said. "Not the running, not the danger—that I can survive. I've survived worse. I mean the actual thing. A baby. Alone."

"You're not—"

"Let me finish." He closed his mouth. "I have no savings that's really mine. I have a job I love but it doesn't pay enough for daycare and diapers and doctors, not on its own. I don't know how to be pregnant and still work a full day. I don't know how you push a person out of your body and then just keep functioning like a human being twelve hours later. And I don't have a mother who showed me how to be one. Mine left before I was old enough to remember her face. So if I do this, I'm building something from nothing, with no map."

"You're not from nothing," Jake said. "You're one of the most capable people I've ever watched work a room full of grieving, terrified people and keep them calm."

"That's not the same as knowing how to love a baby right. What if I turn into her? What if I turn into him? What if being scared all the time is the only thing I have to pass down?"

"You won't."

"You don't know that."

"No," he admitted. "I don't. Nobody knows that about themselves until they're in it. But I know you check on people before you check on yourself. I know you circled back for Raven's shift schedule the same week Derek's guy showed up outside. That's not nothing, Emma. That's not a small thing to build on."

I looked down at my hands. "I haven't decided. About any of it. Keeping it, ending it—I go back and forth ten times a day, and every time I land somewhere I feel guilty for even considering the other option. I need you to hear that I haven't decided, so nothing you say to me next assumes I have."

"Okay," he said, steady. "Ask me whatever you need to ask me."

"If I don't continue it," I said, "does anything change? Between us, with the club, with all of this protection you've built around me?"

"No," Jake said, without hesitation. "None of it. You're not safer to me pregnant than you are not pregnant. I'm not protecting a baby. I'm protecting you."

"And if I do continue it," I said, "what do you expect? From yourself. With it."

"Nothing I haven't earned yet," he said. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you I'll be a father, because that's not mine to claim. If you want me in that kid's life, we figure out what that looks like together, on your terms. If you don't, I'll still make sure you and it are safe for as long as Derek's a threat, because that part isn't conditional."

"And the club's protection," I said. "Does that come with strings? Later, when this is over—if it's ever over—am I going to owe somebody something for all of this?"

"No," he said, and something in his jaw tightened like the question cost him. "Nobody's keeping a ledger on you, Emma. Not me."

I studied him for a long moment—the ink climbing his forearms, the cut folded over the back of the chair, the size of him that used to read as danger and now read as something closer to shelter.

"Come here," I said.

He didn't move fast. He came slow, the way he always did when I asked him for something, like he was giving me every chance to change my mind on the way there. I stood, and the height difference put my face near his chest, and I put my palm flat against the leather over his heart the same way I had before.

"I want to kiss you," I said. "That doesn't mean I've decided anything else tonight."

"Understood," he said.

I kissed him first. His hands found my waist, careful, thumbs resting light like he was memorizing where he was allowed to be. I felt the difference—the way this wanted nothing from me except itself, no debt collecting underneath it, no expectation stacking up behind his mouth on mine. When his hand slid up along my back, I let it stay there.

"I want you," I said against his mouth, honest in a way that scared me a little. "Wanting you doesn't mean I'm ready for more than this."

"Then this is what we have," he said, and pulled back just enough to look at me instead of past me. "I'm not keeping score, Emma."

I believed him. That was the terrifying part—I actually believed him.

We were still standing like that, foreheads together, when his phone buzzed against the nightstand, then buzzed again, more urgent the second time.

He reached for it without letting go of my waist, read the screen, and I watched his face change.

"Hearing got moved," he said. "Judge Whitfield's clearing his morning. We're on the docket at nine A.M."

"Tomorrow," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Tomorrow," he confirmed, and then, quieter, like he didn't want to say it but couldn't not: "And there's a message. Sent to the front desk twenty minutes ago. No name. Just says—*tell her congratulations.*