Chapter 21

"No." Emma dropped her bag and backed away, wanting to have her hands free and room to maneuver if, as she strongly suspected, things were about to get very interesting. "No thanks. I'm not going anywhere with you yahoos."

"Why?" Tamara's bafflement was evident and, by every appearance, genuine. "What are you talking about? We're here to take you to safety, just as ordered."

Did James really send them? It was completely against policy, mind-bogglingly careless, or both, for him to entrust her to a pair of freelance security contractors (if that was even what Tamara and Lacey were) instead of their own people. From what Emma had observed of her boss, he seemed both conscientious and dedicated to his job – kind of an arrogant prick at times, sure, but find her a guy in this line of work who wasn't. She didn't, couldn't believe that he would have purposefully endangered her, and by extension a huge case, for no apparent reason. And if Tamara and her cronies had somehow infiltrated the system, stealthily taking over the actual agents' place or whatever in God's name they were doing. . . well, they weren't here to sell Girl Scout cookies. That was for damn sure.

Emma continued to stand rooted to the floor. "I want to see some identification."

Tamara smiled faintly. "You don't need to see our identification."

"Are you for fucking real? Jedi mind tricks don't work on me. I said ID and I said now." Oh God, where was her gun? Unloaded in its carrying case at the bottom of her suitcase, naturally. In default of which, she dove for her cell phone, but was intercepted by Lacey. Which gave Emma, as if she needed it, the final certainty of their nefarious intentions. Oh, now they'd done it. Shit was going down.

Emma braced, met the other woman head-on, and after a few moments of wrestling, got Lacey's arm twisted in a judo hold, slamming her down on her knees. But then Greg was coming for her as well, and Emma had to let go, jabbing her fingers into his eyes with one hand and throwing a hard right hook with the other. While his skull was still ringing, she swept his legs out from under him, dumping him on his ass, and applied similar measures to Lacey as she tried to get up. Then in the instant of time this bought her, Emma clawed for her phone, trying to hit the button to call James back. All she needed was a second, then –

The shock of blazing blue energy took her blindsided, coruscating and cartwheeling down her body, her suddenly nerveless, spasming limbs. Her phone slid out of her reach, her salvation vanished, as Tamara stood above her, pointing some kind of handheld Taser until smoke was billowing out of Emma's ears and she writhed and thrashed as if she was, in fact, being electrocuted. Then Tamara clicked the beam off, helped Greg and Lacey up, and said with a sigh, "I promise you, it did not need to be that hard. Especially seeing as we're doing you a favor. Come on. We're wasting time."

Emma was powerless to resist as they duct-taped her mouth and wrists, hoisted her like a dead log, and carried her down the stairs. She kept trying to make some noise, to cause one of the other neighbors to look out, but couldn't. They issued out to the alley, where a silver Lexus hitched to a U-Haul trailer was waiting, and that jogged her memory. Two years ago, an ambush outside the Boston College train station late at night, right before August swooped in to rescue her, a guy and a girl – she was now willing to bet Fort Knox that the girl had been Tamara, but she didn't think the guy had been Greg. Someone else. And she thought she knew who.

Oh God. He must be in on this. Killian Jones. Suddenly, this all made horrifying sense. They were working for him, had bugged or spied or tapped the ATF offices somehow, realized that Emma could bring him down, and were acting to remove her before she could testify against whatever organized crime syndicate they were running – the next stop was definitely the Charles River, a black garbage bag, and a brick. She had to get out of this, now. It would help if she could even fucking feel her feet, and she struggled not to choke on her panic.

Emma jerked and twitched uselessly as they loaded her into the boot of the Lexus, tied her down, and threw a dark blanket over her. She heard her own phone ring, and Tamara answered it, reporting matter-of-factly that they'd retrieved her and were taking her to the safe house, going "off the grid" for extra precautions. Then Emma heard a wheedle, a clatter, and a faint splash as Tamara hung up, powered the phone off, and threw it down a sewer.

The conspirators got into the car. The engine started up under Emma's ear, and she realized that she wasn't going to escape this now. Her only chance was to try to fight her way free when they untied her and took her out to kill her. She lay like a broken puppet, every nerve screaming – it wouldn't be that far to a suitably remote place to do the deed. Oh God, what if they weighed her down and dumped her into the river alive? That way, sometime in the future when the forensics investigators or just a hapless fisherman dredged up whatever was left of her, there would be no incriminating things like bullet holes or stab wounds. She'd still fairly obviously have been murdered, but it would be a tough row to hoe, nothing to connect anyone. Into the unsolved cases file, fodder for true-crime shows. She could all too well imagine drowning, suffocating, in the black and cold and mud and murk, down and down and down.

Emma's adrenaline was overloading her system, but they didn't stop. Instead they kept driving, until she was certain that they must be well out of Boston. The city lights had dwindled; it was only the night, the low drone of the air conditioning, and her captors' voices. Emma listened as hard as she could. Tamara was driving, and someone – probably Greg, since he kept reading aloud from it – was paging through some kind of book or binder. It sounded like academic research, but not any kind of academic research Emma had ever heard. Most of it was completely incomprehensible, but her ears pricked up when Greg said, "So according to Jones, this kind of curse will have a failsafe, a self-destruct trigger. You think that's what H.O. is after?"

"Probably." Tamara sounded irritated. "I don't see why it should be other than a routine job, frankly, but this case has been kicking our butts. There's something else about Storybrooke that we need to look into, and now that we finally have her, we can't go in there off our guard."

Jones. Emma wanted to be sick. Jesus, they were in it together. Probably August as well, to judge from the book he'd written – Once Upon A Time, set in Storybrooke, Maine, that book with its protagonist so uncannily like her. Some kind of gruesome conspiracy that went far further than Emma's abused brain could possibly riddle out. But this was getting much too complicated for a simple plan to ice her and make her disappear just so she couldn't testify in a court case. If so, they could have done that already. So what were they up to? What?

Time blurred and jarred away. Despite herself, Emma must have fallen into a troubled doze, because when she opened her eyes again, the car had stopped and her arms and legs were burning with a thousand painful needles of returned sensation. She was still tied up in the boot, fiendishly sore, thirsty, cramped, and in desperate need of a pee, and strained to hear any sound, any hint, anything. Then the trunk clicked open, the blanket whisked away, a flashlight dazed her eyes, and Greg untied the ropes and hauled her out like a sack of flour.

"Do you recognize where we are?" It was Tamara's voice, somewhere behind the flashlight.

Emma wrenched her taped hands up to wipe her streaming eyes, and squinted. Some dark and quiet two-lane county highway, thickly wooded, deep in the boonies. "No."

"What about that?" Tamara pointed her flashlight.

A jolt went through Emma to the back of her spine. Just a green-and-white road sign, but not. Welcome to Storybrooke.

Holy hell. It was here? It was real? Had they found it somehow, despite – or because – of her? Was she the key to something much larger, a campaign against the town itself? Every time she thought she got a handle on what was actually going on, the rug jerked out from under her.

"No," she lied, as convincingly as she could. Give her a few more minutes, and she might have her strength back. If she could just play dumb until then, she'd –

These incoherent scraps of a plan were brought up smartly short by something blunt jabbing into her back. Not a gun, but just as bad – the custom Taser Tamara had used to completely put her out of commission back in Boston. Except this time it was Lacey holding it, apparently nursing a grudge for Emma nearly breaking her arm, and in case she missed the point, Greg was aiming a real gun. "Good. Let's go."

Emma was heaved back into the Lexus and spent a further fifteen minutes in a ripe stew of bewilderment and panic. Then they parked again, and when she was extracted this time, they were on the main drag of some postcard-perfect New England hamlet. Dark and deserted, of course, but she could see a diner, an auto body place, a florist, a general store, a coffee shop, and some impressive building – maybe a library in a former life – with boarded-up windows and a clock tower. It was broken; she could tell by the fact that it was definitely not 8:15pm.

The institution they had pulled up next to, however, was none of these. Mr. Gold, Pawnbroker. Just as Emma finished thinking that she saw absolutely no reason to be visiting a pawnshop at three in the morning if not to perform a good old-fashioned smash and grab, Greg ripped the duct tape off her mouth, making her grimace and gag as he apparently took most of the skin with it. Then, handing his gun to Tamara to keep it trained on Emma's head, he strolled over to the U-Haul trailer, unlatched the door, and pulled it up.

Killian Jones was tied up inside.

If it had been the President of the United States, Emma could not possibly be more shocked. He was gagged with a white handkerchief, bound from chest to waist with rope – to judge from that and the bruises on his face, he had put up one hell of a fight. After seeing him with the poker in the hotel lobby, she wouldn't doubt it, but what the fuck? Pretty much every police force in New England had been looking for this guy, and these three amateur chuckleheads had been able to just waltz in and take him down? Though there was nothing funny about that Taser. Were they not working for him after all? Was this some kind of setup to make her think that they were on different sides? But tying him up and stunning him seemed, once again, all out of proportion to the situation. Utterly and absolutely lost, Emma just gaped.

Jones hadn't seen her. He too was blinking like an owl against the flashlight, but as those astonishingly blue eyes focused on Tamara, they went as narrow and slitted as a snake's. "Pet." Even through the gag, it couldn't have sounded more threatening if he'd openly announced his intention to murder her.

"Captain." She smiled. "Don't look at me like that. If all goes well, you're mere moments away from your revenge. All you have to do is one small job."

"Somehow I doubt that."

Greg leaned in and cut the handkerchief, pulling it out of Jones' mouth. "It's true, mate. Not a whole lot for you to go back to at the moment, is there? Got the entire law looking for you. Hunted fugitive, huh? Might want to consider that."

At that, something clicked in Emma's head. How the agency had been made aware of "Shamrock" in the first place, the fact that Tamara and Greg had been able to intercept James' people (what the hell had happened to them?) and then conveniently filch the culprit. . . suddenly, she got it, and she looked wildly between the three of them. "Which one of you is the Librarian?"

Hearing her voice, Jones' head snapped in her direction. Likewise, he could not have looked more shocked to behold the Queen of England. "Swan? Whatare you doing here?!"

"Same as you, it looks like," Emma managed. "These assholes kidnapped us. Now, seriously. Who's the Librarian?"

Lacey smiled thinly. "Me."

"Dear little Belle?" Killian sat up straight, or as straight as he could with the ropes. "My, my. This is quite a transformation."

Emma stared at him. "So you do know them."

"Run into each other. Here and there." The captive made an attempt at an insouciant shrug, but his attention was still fixed on the terrible trio. "Since you've gone to all this touching trouble, I'll assume you have a good reason for it. So. What the bloody hell do you want with me?"

"We just want to offer you a job." Greg stepped back in. "We're going to go in there, and we're going to find out a specific piece of information from the crocodile. Where something is. Then you're going to get it. You and her." He jerked his head at Emma. "Then we're going to use it. Your quest for vengeance could be over before dinnertime tonight. Everyone goes home happy."

"That's absolutely fascinating." Killian Jones could not have sounded more bored if Greg had been reading tax records, but a hungry, animal glint had sparked in his eyes, and it made him more than a little terrifying. It was almost as if Emma could see the shroud of darkness settling over him, changing him, transmogrifying him. "Why do I get the impression, however, that it may just neglect to be so simple?"

"Maybe it is. We have a deal?"

A pause. Then Killian's twisted grin widened. "Aye. Untie me."

Greg stepped in and began to busily saw through the knot with a box cutter. It took a while, but they got him loose, and Killian emerged from the trailer with sore, stalking grace, rubbing his wrists to restore feeling. Emma kept several paces away from him, more on edge than ever. What was that about the two of them going to find something? What thing? What did it do? She remembering hearing Greg and Tamara talking in the car about a failsafe, a trigger. . . but what the fuck was this, about vengeance? Dear God, they were all crazy. Maybe if they left her out here. . . she wondered how far she could run before they. . .

"Come on." Tamara jabbed the butt of the Taser into Emma's back.

Emma, swallowing a baleful retort, nonetheless had no choice but to obey. The five of them marched up to the dark front door of the pawn shop, and Killian cocked his head critically. "Is he even bloody here?"

"He's going to be in a few minutes." Greg handed the gun to Lacey, slipped on black gloves, produced a crowbar from somewhere about his person, and smashed the glass pane with two matter-of-fact blows. Then, as alarms started to shrill, he reached in, unlocked the door from the inside, and swung it open to admit them.

It was dark, cluttered, and noisy inside, due to the continued racket of the alarm. Emma winced and tried to cover her ears, but her wrists were still taped, and she couldn't. Blinking hard to adjust her eyes to the gloom, she could make out a glass counter, knickknacks and bric-a-brac of every description, antiques and lamps and jewelry, paintings and model ships and mobiles, a carved pirate and knight, display cases, swords, and more. The night had become so surreal that she could only go along with it, even if with a horribly growing certainty that she might not live to see the end. Could she find something in here to use a weapon – take Tamara off guard long enough to knock the Taser loose – though how she'd ever find her way out of this town or back to Boston was seriously up for grabs, probably get lost in the woods or be caught or –

It felt like a eternity, but was indeed perhaps only five minutes, until an old-fashioned black Cadillac pulled up outside with a screech. The dark silhouette of the driver leapt out, ran to the door, saw the broken glass – jerked it open with a violent curse, turned to key in the alarm override, then hit the lights and –

"Good morning." It was Lacey who spoke, stepping out and cocking the gun. "We've got a few questions for you."

The man in the doorway – Mr. Gold, Emma took a wild guess – was of inconsequent height, shaggy brown hair going grey, clad in his dressing gown and leaning on a cane. But his brown eyes were completely blank with shock as he stared at Lacey, seeming to see none of the other four intruders. His lips formed soundlessly around the name before he managed to utter it. "B. . . Belle?"

"I'm sorry. No one here named Belle." Lacey shrugged, the muzzle of the gun never wavering from where it was aimed at him. "We're in a hurry. Tamara?"

"Thank you, hon." The other woman smiled, then addressed herself coolly to the pawnbroker. "Where's the self-destruct for the curse?"

"I. . . what?" Gold had barely seemed to blink, to breathe, since he had seen Lacey – but why did everyone keep calling her Belle? "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't. You made the curse, you know everything about it. Where is it?"

"Who the hell are you?" Gold's attention was torn off Lacey long enough to stare Tamara and Greg down. "Get out of my shop, before I – "

"Call the police?" Greg held up two cut, sputtering telephone wires. "Good luck with that."

"No, before I kill you all with my bare hands and keep the pieces for a midnight snack. You think you know who I am. Very well. But you don't. You have no idea what you're dealing with." Gold stumped forward, cane pounding the floor. "So I'll thank you kindly to make this simple for myself and you, and – "

"And?" It was Tamara's turn to hold up something. Small, fragile. A chipped porcelain cup.

Gold grew very still. In its way, it was almost more threatening. "Give me that."

"You shouldn't leave valuables lying around." Tamara turned to Lacey, holding it out. "Do you recognize this?"

Lacey glanced at it, then shrugged. "No. Should I?"

"Belle. Belle, sweetheart." Gold's voice was openly imploring. He hadn't yet noticed Killian and Emma, lurking in the shadows at the back, and Emma, for her part, was perfectly content to keep it that way. Whoever this guy was, he scared her. Beside her, Killian hadn't moved or made a sound, staring at the other man with something almost alive in its malevolence, its complete, depthless hatred. As Gold repeated his entreaty, Killian's lips curled back over his teeth. It made him look downright demonic.

Emma tried to slide backwards as quietly as possible, away from the lot of them. There was a curtain nearby, presumably leading to a back room, and all she needed was a few moments. She rasped her wrists back and forth, but they'd used at least a dozen wraps of duct tape, and she couldn't get even a little slack. If she survived tonight, she was seriously considering getting some mundane rat-race job in a cubicle farm somewhere.

"Why do you keep calling me Belle?" Lacey's confusion and irritation was apparent. "Just tell us where the trigger for the self-destruct is, or. . ." She took a step and jammed the gun under Gold's chin.

"No. No, sweetheart, this isn't you." Gold pushed it aside, his eyes brimming with unshed tears. "I don't know what these people have done to you, but they'll suffer. Please. Belle. Look." He reached out with his free hand and took the chipped cup, closing her fingers around it. "It's you, it's your talisman. You brought me back when I was a monster. You remembered me when I couldn't. I want to do the same for you now. Belle. That was your name. A beautiful woman who loved an ugly man. Try, sweetheart. Please try. I. . . I know there's no magic here, but love is the most powerful magic of all."

Lacey flinched, but didn't pull away. Her fingers opened on the gun, and it clattered to the floor. She in turned seemed transfixed, transformed, as the entire shop held its breath, as she stared at the cup. Her face screwed up as if she was in physical pain, and her eyes fluttered closed. Then, slowly, they opened, and she raised them to his, teary and disbelieving. In the tiniest of voices, she breathed, "Rumple?"

"It's me. It's me, darling." Gold's tears began to overflow as he cupped her face in his hands, radiant with joy, resting their foreheads together. "It's me. You're back. You're safe. I won't ever let anyone hurt you again."

He leaned forward for a kiss, as Lacey – Belle – began to sob, wrapping her arms around his neck. And then, next to Emma, there was a blur of movement, a dark shape shoving Tamara and Greg aside, and the thunderous report of the gun, echoing like the breaking of the world in the small confines of the shop.

Belle remained standing, but her face turned pale and cold, even as a spreading red stain showed on the shoulder of her blue dress. Then she slumped forward against Gold, as the chipped cup fell to the floor and broke into a thousand pieces. As he shouted in horror, struggled to hold her up, she lost her balance and fell altogether, shoving at him and sobbing. "No – no, get away from me – what did you – who are you, I don't know you, you're not – "

The pawnbroker seemed to look up in slow motion. Over her head, straight into the face of Killian Jones, still pointing the smoking pistol and grinning insanely. "I wouldn't count on it, crocodile."

"You!" Gold laid Belle on the floor and straightened up, alive with madness. "YOU!"

"Me. You're losing your touch. Time was, you'd have known at once. You remember another morning duel, coward?" Killian's teeth were bared, his eyes aflame. "When you took everything from me? I hope you paid attention to how that felt just now, seeing her fall in your arms, leaving you, forgetting you. I hope you paid attention bloody well. Now think about that, and I'm going to kill you." He cocked the gun again with a sinister clunk.

This was it. He was demented. He'd just shot a woman, was about to do worse – had played Tamara and Greg through and through. From the moment he'd seen Belle, he'd never meant to go along with whatever their original plan was. Had just agreed to get them to untie him. If it was true that they were the ones who'd framed him in the first place – but he was a murderer, and she'd just seen indubitable proof –

And then, in that moment, Emma Swan acted.

She snatched up an umbrella stand, and lunged. Her swing was clumsy with her taped wrists, but good enough, and it took Killian Jones squarely in the back of the head, dropping him like a stone. She wrenched the gun from his hands, juggled it, snatched it, and used the instant of stunned silence to make a break for it, slamming past them and through the door.

Outside, frantic and breathless, she ran down the street into the residential neighborhood beyond, and up the porch of the first house she saw. She banged on the door until a sleepy householder answered. "Call 911!" she screamed in his face. "Call 911 right now!"

He was, naturally, shocked, but promptly complied, and in a few minutes more, the dark street was overrun with red and blue flashing lights as the police, ambulance, and several more emergency vehicles swerved into sight, setting up a cordon around the pawn shop before they went in. Belle came out on a stretcher, accompanied by Gold, and Greg and Tamara were marched out behind. And then, last, Killian Jones emerged in handcuffs, as the sheriff – a good-looking guy, younger than expected, with sandy curls – forced him into the cruiser and slammed the door.

As the sheriff was moving to get in himself, Emma ran after him. "Wait! Wait!" She grabbed his arm with almost hysterical strength. "My name is Emma Swan, I'm an ATF agent in Boston, those two – " she pointed at Greg and Tamara – "they kidnapped me from my apartment. I'm pretty sure the office is compromised somehow, but I need to contact my boss, I need to – "

"Whoa, whoa! It's all right. You're all right." Just then, glancing down, he saw her wrists, and his lips pressed into a thin line. Without another word, he pulled out his pocket knife and cut the tape off, detaching it carefully from her skin.

"Th – thank you." For the first time during the whole nightmarish ordeal, her voice started to shake. "I don't know, I – "

"It's all right," he said again, soothingly. "What did you say your name was, again?"

"Emma." She swallowed. "Swan."

A faint, startled look crossed his face, as if it was familiar, but he couldn't place it. "Sheriff Graham Humbert at your service. You're shivering." He pulled off his brown bomber jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. "I have to take this crazy bastard down to the station and get him booked, but I'll be back to talk to you. Tomorrow morning, likely. Now, how about you head back up there." He pointed to the house she'd run to. "The Nolans will take care of you."

Nolan? The name was another shock on a night already brimful with them. No. Nothing. It's not that uncommon a name. Nonetheless, Emma felt weak-kneed as Graham swung behind the wheel of the cruiser and pulled out, sirens blaring. She remained standing there until a woman came up and took her by the elbow. "Hon?"

Emma jumped and whirled to face her with an expression like a hunted animal.

"It's all right. Come inside." The woman led her up the steps, past the sign and the kitschy windmill in the front yard, and into the house. "I'm Kathryn, and this is my husband David. You're safe with us."

The man who'd called 911 for her was standing in the hall. "It gets pretty chilly up here at night, even in August," he said gently. "Can I make you something hot to drink?"

"S-sure. Thanks." Emma eased into a kitchen chair, still shaking. "Can I use your phone?"

Kathryn passed her the cordless, and she punched in the emergency number for the office. It rang and rang, but – completely bafflingly – nobody picked up.

David handed her a cup. Hot chocolate, with whipped cream and cinnamon. How had he known she liked it that way? "Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Fine." It wasn't. Somebody was supposed to man that line twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Why was no one answering? It wasn't as if she'd dropped off the face of the planet, not like this place was cursed so nobody could find it and to all intents and purpose, it did not exist to the outside world. That was just part of whatever insanity Greg and Tamara had been cooking up, and as for them, they'd better be put away for a long fucking time. But instead of elaborating, Emma sipped her hot chocolate and tried not to stare.

David Nolan. No. Still some kind of sick coincidence. This guy was too young to be her dad, and his wife's name was Kathryn, not Mary Margaret. It didn't mean anything. But as she kept looking and wondering, the hunger, the need, almost crushed her. She could no longer hold back. "Excuse me, this is a personal question. But do you. . . do you have. . . a daughter?"

David and Kathryn both looked surprised, then shook their heads. "No. We've tried, but it hasn't happened for us."

"Oh." Emma felt the small, stupid hope in her heart deflate as if punctured. That answers that. See. Don't be an idiot. "I'm sorry."

"It's all right. You're probably very tired. When you finish your drink, we have an extra room upstairs."

"Thank you. You've been very kind." In fact, Emma couldn't finish her hot chocolate; her throat was stuck shut. After a few more empty pleasantries, she stumbled upstairs, along the hall, and through the door that Kathryn indicated. There was something almost familiar about it, like walking through a time warp into your childhood room after years away, and it made more tears bubble to the surface, hard as she tried to scrub them away. She undressed, crawled into bed, and took a deep breath of the pillow. It even smelled like the shampoo she'd used as a teenager.

She closed her eyes. Sleep claimed her before they got all the way there.

Emma slept as if she'd been concussed, and awoke late the next morning, with sunlight streaming through the gauzy white curtains and a hesitant knocking on the door. "Emma? Miss Swan? Are you awake? The sheriff's here to talk to you."

Quite disappointed that last night had not been a dream, but relieved that she hadn't been snatched away by gremlins or something, Emma sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Yeah. I'm – I'm awake. I'm coming."

She swung over her legs over the side of the bed and dressed quickly, knotting her unwashed hair into a slapdash ponytail and grabbing the brown jacket off the chair where she'd dropped it. Then she padded down the creaking stairs and beheld the sheriff – Graham – waiting in the foyer with hands clasped behind his back, like an old-fashioned schoolboy about to recite. At the sound of her steps, he turned toward her and smiled, almost shyly. "Good morning, Miss Swan."

"Good morning." Her mouth was dry. She foisted his jacket back at him like a shield, warding him off. She could already tell that she couldn't let him any closer. "Thanks for the loan."

"No problem at all." He took it back and folded it over his arm. "I was hoping to ask you a few questions about last night."

"Great. I've got a fuck-ton myself."

"Take you down to the station?" Seeing her tense, Graham added, "Those three idiots are safely locked up where they belong, and we anticipate filing charges. They won't trouble you again."

Emma exhaled. "Okay. Cool. Let's go then."

After bidding farewell to David and Kathryn Nolan, and thanking them for their hospitality, she followed Graham down the steps of the Victorian to the cruiser, the passenger door of which he held open for her. "You do this policing bit all by yourself?" she asked, ducking in.

"Yes." He shrugged awkwardly. "It's in my budget to hire a deputy, actually, but for some reason I've never got around to it. You said you work in law enforcement?"

"Yeah. The ATF office in Boston. I'm not staying," Emma hastened to add. "Just try to get this ridiculous mess sorted out and get in contact with my boss."

She thought Graham might have been disappointed, but he did his best to hide it. They made polite, impersonal small talk as he drove through downtown, which was clearly buzzing about the events of last night – they probably hadn't had so much excitement in years. Then he turned into the sheriff's station, parked, and once more darted around to open her door for her. Emma had never had a guy be chivalrous to her before, even in dumb things that she could completely do for herself, but Graham's earnestness and sincerity was so apparent that she felt bad blowing him off. It was kind of nice, actually. No one had ever put her first.

She got out and followed him up the steps, through the doors and into the station. A glass-walled office faced two jail cells – apparently there wasn't what you'd call an epidemic of crime around here – and her instinct noticed something wrong before she consciously processed it. Greg and Tamara were shut in one, but the other –

The cell door was open. So was the window.

Killian Jones was gone.