Huge thanks to reader Atala Embers for making the awesome cover for this!

Chapter 7

Everything after that was a blur.

Emma was taken downtown to the Boston division offices, booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and processed, stuck for a small eternity in a sweltering, windowless steel room, and then finally taken, still in handcuffs, to meet with a police investigator and the district attorney, who she disliked on sight. Spencer King was a hard-edged, mid-fifties battle-axe who clearly relished nothing so much as shutting up young delinquents in jail where they damn well belonged, and not even five minutes in, Emma had already worked out that she was in deep, deep shit. She'd waived her right to a public defender, still under the misguided impression that she could explain everything and they'd nod, agree, and let her go, but with King's relentless questions battering her from every side, all she managed to do was incriminate herself. They got her to admit that she'd known about the pot-running operation, that she'd known where it was based, that she'd profited from its existence (they were just shows! Clubs! She hadn't been laundering money or illegally buying handguns!) and she was familiar with its highest-profile clients. This all came before she was given a single chance to mention Neal's name.

During a break, while King and the detective got coffee and left Emma sitting alone at the interrogation table, she tried to come up with a sensible plan of action. They were going to allow her that one phone call, weren't they? Or were they just going to haul her off to the federal pokey and hold her without bond? Sixty-two pounds of pot, found in her Bug – a felony, mandatory minimum jail sentence of a year, $10,000 fine, almost certain expulsion from school, going on her permanent record since she was over 18 – she would pass out if she focused on it too much. How had this even happened? Why would Neal frame her and make a break for it? They'd been fighting, sure, but this went far beyond the pale of anything she had expected. It was downright sociopathic. And he'd apologized to her, albeit after having sex with her while she couldn't remember anything and scaring the hell out of her the next morning. He'd cared for her, hadn't he? What had she done to deserve this, the end of her life as she knew it? What?

Emma whimpered and dug her fingernails into her palms, hard enough that she felt the skin break. She could still stop answering and ask for a lawyer, she had the right, but she had the feeling, a thousand times worse than failing a math test, that it wouldn't make a difference. She had nothing left to do but throw her cards on the table, and when the men returned and asked if she was ready to continue, she blurted out, "But it wasn't me! My – my boyfriend, Neal Cassidy, he was the one who did this! I don't know what he did it for, I don't – "

The detective and the DA exchanged patently skeptical glances. "Was this Neal Cassidy a student at Boston College?" King fired at her.

"Yeah, he was, is, a – a senior, I think." Emma faltered under his steely stare. "He knew the guys on the hockey team and he was the one who was selling to them, I just – "

"Miss Nolan." King removed his rimless glasses and folded them on the table. "Normally I charge for this information, but for you, I'm going to offer it pro bono. We could stop this session right now and have a case that would stand up watertight in court, so pulling that trick isn't going to work. If you have anything else you'd like to – "

"Please," Emma interrupted desperately. "Can you at least look into it?"

King shot a displeased look at the investigator, who nodded minutely. The DA pulled out his cell phone, excused himself, and stepped into the neighboring room to make a call, which didn't take long. He had even more of a Cheshire Cat grin when he returned. "I just put in an inquiry with the registrar at Boston College. They have no record of a student named Neal Cassidy ever being enrolled at the school."

"I. . . what?" Emma felt like somebody had just driven a front-end loader through her chest. "What? No! That's not possible! He was my boyfriend, he used my exam notes, I didn't make him up! You can ask around campus, people know him!"

"Not according to the official archive." Spencer King was looking more and more self-satisfied by the moment. "Is there anything else you'd like to say, Miss Nolan, or should we go ahead and conclude this session and transfer you to the county lockup?"

"I. . ." Emma was frantic. "I didn't do it! I want my phone call, I want – " She didn't even know what she wanted, other than for all of this to be a long, drawn-out, lurid bad dream that she was about to wake up from. Had Neal just been hanging around and pretending to be a student for some unfathomable purpose of his own, or had he potentially gotten his Russian roommates and their crack KGB cyber-terrorist skills to hack into the BC database and erase his tracks? "Please," she said, gulping back tears. "My call?"

The men exchanged a dubious glance, but at last, inclined their heads half an inch. A state trooper shuttled her out to the phone bolted to the industrial steel wall. A few weeks ago she had been joking with Alice about how the only time anybody called collect anymore was from jail. She had never imagined she was about to get a chance to prove it herself.

Emma picked up the receiver and hesitated, agonizing. The absolute last thing she wanted to do was call her parents – wasn't that every mom or dad's worst nightmare, getting a call from your kid in jail? At least she hadn't killed anybody, but they were still going to flip a wig. She'd been a stubborn and bratty teenager at times, she could admit it, but at least the worst shit she'd put them through was staying out late past her curfew and getting busted for underage drinking (once!) in the woods. Telling them this, that she was facing jail time and a felony conviction and expulsion unless she could find a way to clear her name. . .

The prospect almost made Emma throw up, and she didn't spook easily. She'd always been up for watching gory horror movies in high school, staring intently at the screen while even some of her guy friends groaned and covered their eyes, and their annual attempts to take her to the Halloween festival and scare her in the haunted house always comically backfired. But that was why, she supposed, she had to do it. Jerking in a few deep, ragged breaths, she gathered up all her courage and punched in her mom's cell phone number.

It rang a few times, as Emma closed her eyes and prayed alternately that Mary Margaret wouldn't pick up and that she would. But it was Wednesday, a school day, and she was probably teaching. Which meant –

The line clicked, and a recorded byte of her mom's voice rolled on. "Hi, you've reached Mary Margaret Nolan. I'm not available right now, but if you leave a message, I'll call you back just as soon as I can. Have a great day, and remember, whistle while you work!" Beeeeeep.

Emma let out a shaky breath. "H-hi. Mom. It's – me. Hey. Um. Something has kind of happened, and I – I don't have my cell phone. I, um. I. . ." Oh shit. Oh God. How did people do this? "I. . . kind of got. . . arrested. They're holding me at – " She glanced up at the stenciling on the wall, and read off the name. "It's a really big clusterfuck and I don't even know what happened. Yeah. Like I said, they confiscated my cell phone, so don't call me back on that. I just. . . " She sucked air, on the hairy edge of ugly crying into the receiver, and she refused to do it with the state trooper a few feet away. "Yeah," she whispered again, voice shaking. "Okay. That's where I am. I'm okay. I'm sorry for making you worry. Yeah. Bye."

She crashed the phone back onto the hook, aware that that had been the least reassuring voice mail in the history of ever. Oh God, Mary Margaret – what was she going to do? Probably run out of school and peel down to Boston on two wheels. Emma hadn't even thought to ask what they were setting her bail at; she already knew her parents couldn't pay it. And it was only ever important people, celebrities busted for drunk driving, who got out on their own recognizance. Stuff she'd learned last year, how the American bail system was based on ancient English common law, geared to nobility and those who could afford to pay, leaving the actual common man screwed over. Which meant she was staying in jail until whenever they decided to ship her off to whichever circuit judge was hearing her case. And a mandatory sentence meant –

A year in prison, oh my God –

"Come along, Miss Nolan." Seeing that she was finished with her call, the trooper took her by the arm. "We're taking you to county to be held overnight. Let's go."

She was out of options. Silently, she followed.

It was pushing six PM, what with everything, by the time Emma arrived at the county jail, was issued an orange jumpsuit, surrendered her personal effects, and submitted to a humiliating search to make sure she wasn't packing anything of a contraband nature. Since she wasn't convicted of a violent crime, they at least took off the handcuffs, but everything was so strange and alien and confusing that she almost imagined that she was playing a role on a TV serial, some police-procedural cable thriller. It was easier to do that, to detach and go away inside, to pretend it was happening to someone else, to build up walls, rather than to be present and terrified and in imminent danger of losing her mind, madly running through potential scenarios like a demented hamster on a wheel. Was she going to be put in a cell? Had anybody told her suitemates what had happened, or had they seen her being led away? Did it matter if her professors knew or not, seeing as she might never set foot on campus again? And she. . . and she. . .

Emma was just about to be taken away to the women's section, thus to begin her first night as an accused felon, when the officer who'd overseen her booking unexpectedly reappeared. He tersely instructed her to come with him, and refused to tell her why, causing her a moment of total panic that he was going to take the cute blonde college girl off into some convenient dark corner and do God knew what with her. She trailed at his heels back into whatever the hell you called a reception area in a jail, separated from the world by an undoubtedly bulletproof, floor-to-ceiling pane of Plexiglas. But there was someone visible on the other side, having a heated argument with the corrections officer, and Emma squinted at it in confusion, trying to work out what the hell this had to do with her. It wasn't her dad and it wasn't Neal, but it was very definitely a man, and –

Oh.

He swung around, and she felt her breath shrivel up in her throat. The reason she hadn't recognized him was because he was wearing a black leather jacket she had never seen him in before, with a high collar, double cuffs, and a row of tarnished brass buttons, something so flatly piratical that it only confirmed her theory about his delusions. But right now, she was in the process of losing everything and everyone in her life, ruining her entire future, and taking the fall for her deadbeat boyfriend's crime. If against all odds, her unearthly hot history professor who may or may not be a paranoid schizophrenic axe murderer pretending to be a fictional villain, who had kissed her and caused her to have a crazy hallucination, wanted to help her, she couldn't exactly turn him down out of hand.

The jacket wasn't the only alteration to his wardrobe. He was wearing the earring and the rings, jeans and black cowboy boots, and eyeliner, like some emo goth rocker. It looked insanely good on him – she'd never met another guy who could pull off the dark smoky eyes, although she did know a few who tried – and it actually distracted her from her predicament for a few beautiful seconds. All in all, he bore only a passing resemblance to the man she'd first met, the mild-mannered Irish scholar in tweed. This was ridiculous. He was dark, menacing, sexual and charming and charismatic and lethal, and she found herself uncomfortably thinking that she could definitely see him pulling off the pirate act. Strap a cutlass on him and give him a skull and crossbones to raise, and they'd be casting him in the next big-budget movie alongside Johnny Depp before you could say, "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum."

At that moment, however, Emma's total stupefaction was rudely interrupted by reality. Whatever the hell he was doing, she'd have to be very careful with how she handled it. She couldn't afford to go from the frying pan into the fire, especially considering that her panicked parents were tearing down the interstate right now – or were they? Not knowing was the worst. Or –

"Miss Nolan." The officer pointed at Killian. "Can you identify that man?"

Oh crap. Were they arresting him too, as an accessory to something? Had they found out about Mr. Gold? But she was too scared not to answer. "He's my – friend. His name is Killian Jones."

"Would it interest you to learn that he has expressed a desire to pay your bail?"

What? Oh shit, what? Was this some kind of trick, seeing if they could implicate him in the pot-trafficking scheme too? Oh God, she thought he was crazy, but she didn't want him shut away (or did she?) Which would mean that –

The officer was waiting, not so patiently, for an answer.

Emma swallowed. "I didn't know he had that in mind. I don't know how he found out."

The officer gave her a dubious look, but said nothing, until his radio crackled and he lifted it to his mouth, muttering something that she couldn't understand. Then he clicked it off, slung it on his belt, and said, "Well, princess, looks like it's your lucky day. Your. . . friend out there has apparently said he'll put up the money. Doesn't mean you're off the hook – you'll still have to come back for trial and all that – but the suits will take care of that. Once the payment comes through, you sign the affidavit stating that you understand the drill, and you're out."

Emma blinked, blinked again, opened her mouth, and shut it. She sat in total silence until another officer came to get her, led her down the hall where her clothes were returned to her, and barely an hour after she'd changed into the jail jumpsuit, she was stripping it off and getting dressed again and barely listening to the hatchet-faced sourpuss warning her off all the dire things that would happen if she failed to show up in sixty days for the start of legal proceedings, and that getting out of jail didn't mean that the charges had gone away. She nodded again and then again, signed whatever they put in front of her, and then, at last, was escorted out into the hall.

Killian was standing a few feet away, his back to her. But as they entered, he sensed them and spun around on his heel, leather coat flaring behind him. They locked eyes, and she reminded herself to react calmly, like an adult, like a sensible person, like a casual acquaintance. As if casual acquaintances just showed up at jail and got you out, no questions asked.

The next moment she had half lunged, half fallen across the space between them, and into his arms.

His hands closed around her wrists, strong and hard enough to bruise, as he pulled her upright and crushed her against him without saying a word. Her face was buried in his chest, as she smelled aftershave and leather and maleness and heard his heart beating under her ear, as she clung onto him like her anchor in the storm. In the refuge of his embrace, she felt better than she had all day. She never wanted it to end. But then as before, reality returned, and badly, shakily, she let go of him and stepped back, coughing and clearing her throat. "Killian," she croaked. "What are you doing here?"

He released her, but his thumb still brushed over her hand. "Never mind that. Let's get out of here."

Emma didn't protest. Presumably her bail had gone through and she was, for now, once more a free woman. Before anyone could discover a paperwork snafu or ask her another question, she bolted like a dog let out for a walk, out the front doors and through a pair of checkpoints to the parking lot. Killian's car, a sleek black Audi with temporary registration, was sitting at the end, and he opened the passenger door for her and bowed her in, like an old-fashioned gentleman. It wasn't until she had scrambled in and buckled up, until she sank against the leather seat and stopped shaking, until they'd left the corrections complex behind and were heading into downtown Boston, that she finally said a word. Two, in fact. "Th-thank you."

"My pleasure." He smiled grimly. "Quite a spot you were in, aye? How the bloody hell did that happen?"

"I. . . don't even know." Belatedly, it occurred to her that he must have known full well about Neal, considering the threat he'd made to expose him. Had Neal somehow caught wind of that and panicked? Or did it – now she was really reaching, but what had just happened to her demanded some kind of explanation, god dammit – have something to do with the mysterious stranger, August, who'd rolled into town and professed not to know Neal? Had he then decided to make introductions and – and do what? Convince Neal to bust her to accomplish what?

This potential explanation made her head hurt. She almost wished Neal had just straightforwardly stabbed her in the back, rather than this melodramatic B-movie bullshit. But considering that if she ever saw him again, the first thing she'd do would be to kick him where it hurt, she didn't anticipate receiving an explanation.

Emma leaned back against the headrest, wondering whether she dared to believe that she was safe, that this was over. Even if she still had the specter of a felony conviction hanging over her head, there had to be something she could do about it. She wouldn't make the mistake of refusing a lawyer again, and there had to be people who would testify on her behalf – Wendy and Alice for a start, who certainly knew that the pot thing had been Neal's lookout and not hers. She still had no clue why Killian had paid her bail, but maybe – whatever he'd seen when they kissed, something had been strong enough to –

It was dark, so she didn't see the road sign to be sure, but something about it caught her attention enough to make her whip her head back and frown. It abruptly dented her giddy optimism, reminded her that Killian's transformation from professor to pirate (fake pirate, but whatever) wasn't necessarily a good thing. That there was something very specific he'd been after, and that his assistance was going to come with the kind of price she might wish after all that she hadn't –

They passed another road sign as Killian executed a flawless no-look merge, and this time, she was sure of it. She snapped up in her seat and stared at it.

I-95 N.

Oh.

Shit.

All this time, she had naïvely assumed that he was taking her back to campus, that they might even join forces and smoke out Neal from whatever foxhole the bastard had burrowed down. But there was no route in existence back to BC that involved taking northbound I-95, and as they gained speed on the entrance ramp and downtown Boston blurred into a haze of lights on the nighttime horizon, she finally and sickeningly understood.

She turned on him in horror. "You," she stammered. It was just fear at first, and then it was anger. "You son of a bitch, you're taking me to Storybrooke!"

He grinned at her, that same way he had back in his office, not the close-mouthed professional smile but the full-on leer, white teeth brilliant in the darkness of the car, the smile that sang to her and horrified her in turn, when the mask of gentility had cracked entirely and all she saw underneath was the madness. He hit the accelerator. "Smart lass."