Emma

The slot clanked open.

"Legal visit, Lawrence," the correctional officer barked. His tone was flat, like the word meant nothing, just another item to check off on his rounds.

I was already standing before my brain caught up, muscle memory moving me where thought couldn't. I turned, slid my wrists into the slot, palms out, reflex by now. The cuffs snapped shut like they always did.

Two nights ago, a plastic chair had split a woman's face in the common room. The COs had stormed in, shouting, cuffing whoever they could reach. Since then, the unit had been on lockdown, with us sealed inside, eating in our cells, pissing in toilets with no privacy, and constantly listening to the buzz of fluorescent lights like it was a lullaby.

The door rolled open with a hiss. The CO's hand was at my elbow before I could take a step, his grip a silent order. The cuffs tugged, the chain biting at the tender skin of my wrists, a pain I barely felt anymore. It was just another piece of choreography I had learned in this place.

The hallway swallowed me with its concrete walls and the faint echoes of women behind steel. I caught a tuneless hum, the scrape of plastic sandals, curses flung in a dozen different languages. Being multilingual wasn't always a gift.

Six months. That was how long I had been at MCC New York. Six months of chains and counts, metal toilets and stale food. Six months of being stripped of everything that made me Emma Lawrence and reduced to a number in a system designed to grind you into dust.

And six months of waiting to see if the courts would let me breathe fresh air again before I turned fifty.

I thought back to my arraignment. It had been chaos.

The assistant U.S. attorney went for blood, stacking the charges like bricks in a wall. Theft of major artwork, conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction. It was the kind of list designed to bury someone alive for decades.

Standing beside me that day was Valerie Sandoval, a top-shot lawyer worth every obscene dollar Eric had ever funneled her way throughout the years. She was our "in case of emergency, break glass" option, and the glass lay in pieces on the floor.

Valerie had argued for bail, for passport surrender, house arrest, an ankle monitor—the whole catalogue of concessions. The judge didn't even blink, and just like that, my file was stamped with a list of titles in bold red. No bail. Flight risk. Embarrassment to the system. I had walked into the Met, humiliated them, and walked out with a Van Gogh. They weren't going to give me another chance to run.

Yet, I could barely stand straight that day. My body was still humming with the shock of Jake's hands snapping the cuffs on my wrists, of Ashford's cruel words in the interrogation room. Less than twenty-four hours later, I was in a courthouse, the fluorescent lights burning into my skull.

And then I saw Eric, and something inside me simply broke. I didn't remember moving, just running, pulling against the chain of the cuffs, shoving past deputies until my cheek was pressed to his shoulder. Protocol shattered. The marshals shouted, but their voices were just noise, lost in the single, desperate act of holding onto my brother, my anchor.

Even then, with my world collapsing, I had to whisper the words only we could understand, Stand your ground. You have nothing to do with this.

The marshals tore me away from him; the shackles clanking as they dragged me backward. For the rest of the hearing, they kept me bound like a violent offender, not a woman who had just lost everything that mattered.

Life in MCC had sanded me down since then. Here, dehumanization came in a thousand small, grinding ways. The cold sting of a strip search. Roll calls that reduced me to nothing but a last name and a string of digits. The noise that never stopped.

I lived on autopilot, hollowed out. Ever since the night I had opened my apartment door and seen the cold emptiness in Jake's eyes, where love used to live, I had felt like I was walking around without a center, a ghost haunting my own life.

They had placed me in general population. My cellmate, a sharp-eyed woman with a dry sense of humor named Milo, had taken pity on me that first night. She was a career criminal in every sense, on her third stint in MCC and waiting for sentencing. It was a dark kind of funny because I was also a career criminal. The only difference was that I had never been caught, not until the man I loved had slammed the cuffs on me.

Milo didn't know that, of course. But she saw me for what I was immediately—a first-timer who looked like she had just been gutted alive. She didn't see an unreadable, invincible master thief; she saw a woman who had just lost everything. And so, she showed me the ropes. She taught me how to make commissary last, how to keep my shoes from being stolen in the showers, and how to tune out the noise at night.

And the routine was simple enough. Lights out at ten, lights on at six. Three bland meals a day with never enough salt. No jobs for the women, as those went to the men. We scrubbed our own units, kept the common areas clean. That was it.

There was no yard, no open sky. Just a rooftop cage where the skyscrapers loomed beyond. It made me feel like a bird in a box, staring at a city that didn't know I existed anymore.

Thankfully, violent was rare in our unit, just desperation. A unit full of women stuck in limbo, waiting for hearings, for sentencing, for transport to the real prisons that would become their world. Most couldn't afford bail. A few, like me, had been denied it outright. Everyone kept to themselves.

You waited. That was prison life here. You waited.

But the truth was, I wasn't waiting for freedom. I was only moving through the motions for Eric. The look on his face in the courtroom haunted me even more than Jake's cold eyes that night.

I saw raw guilt in Eric's blue eyes—the eyes that had always grounded me, a sentence he carried as if it were his own, even though I had begged him not to. That was why I kept going. Why I played along with every chain, every strip-search, every lock clicking shut. Not for me. For him.

Because if I were honest with myself, I had barely any fight left. At the arraignment, I was ready to plead guilty to every charge and end it right there. But Valerie's hand on my arm was steady, her whisper sharp enough to cut through the fog. "That would be suicide."

So when the judge called my name, it wasn't my voice that answered, but hers. "Not guilty, Your Honor."

It wasn't denial; it was time. Time to move the pieces Eric and I had buried years ago, to activate the only contingency plan we had left.

We had made a pact long before the Met, long before settling in New York. If one of us fell, the other survived.

And survival in our world was never about mercy. It was about leverage. And in a life like ours, leverage only came in two forms—money and secrets. We had buried plenty of both. Now it was time to dig them up.

We had secrets tucked away like insurance policies. Names of buyers who smiled in public galleries but hunted in the black market after hours. Collectors who kept entire vaults of stolen canvases behind locked walls. Locations of stashes we had never liquidated, pieces worth millions, tied to no one, just waiting to be unearthed. Supply chains that kept entire underground networks alive, one encrypted drive away from exposure.

That was the trade. That was the contingency. The last card in our deck.

Valerie played messenger, moving carefully in courts and meeting rooms. Eric handled the rest on the outside, ensuring the trail was scrubbed clean, making sure whatever information we handed over could never circle back and bury us deeper.

The deal was simple. The Bureau and the U.S. Attorney's office got what they couldn't resist—truths, leverage, cases they could close, and trophies they could mount.

In return, they never spoke of where it came from. The file would be sealed, and no one would know. Not the press. Not other inmates. And certainly not the other criminals on the street. Nothing in this life was worse than being marked a snitch.

And it worked... or so I hoped.

Six months ago, they had wanted to bury me under twenty-five years of charges, to stack them until I never saw daylight again. Now, they were calculating, moving their pieces against ours.

They also appreciated that I hadn't dragged my past with Jake into the chaos. That had been part of the bargain with the prosecution, though the truth was I had never had any intention of pulling him back into this mess. It worked. Our history stayed buried, never making the papers. To the world, I wasn't a woman who had once loved an FBI agent. I was just the Met thief, caught, caged, and now on trial.

The CO's hand pressed into my arm, nudging me left down another sterile corridor. My stomach twisted in a cold knot.

Valerie must've heard something by now. A new deal, maybe. A number that made all the difference between walking out a ghost in my fifties and walking out still having something that resembled a future.

By the time we reached the door to the visiting rooms, the question was hammering inside me. How many years of concrete and razor wire was my life worth?

The CO's hands moved over my sides in the impersonal, efficient routine I had learned not to flinch through. Then the cuffs came off, and he pushed the door open, and I stepped inside.

Valerie was already seated at the table, a folder open in front of her. She looked up as I entered, and her dark eyes softened. It was the same look that had kept me steady through every hearing—the kind that said she had seen worse, fought harder, and wasn't about to let me fall apart.

It felt like a good sign. God, I needed one.

I sat down opposite her, the chair scraping a protest against the linoleum. My throat was tight, but I forced the words out. "Do we have a deal?"

Valerie sighed, a sound that told me plenty. Still, she flipped open the folder, her eyes scanning the pages with the practiced calm of someone who had delivered far worse verdicts. When her gaze finally met mine, her voice was even, deliberate, as if every word had been measured twice before being spoken.

"They're offering a range," she said. "Four to seven years in exchange for your plea and the cooperation you've already given. The U.S. Attorney's Office will recommend that range at sentencing. The judge decides where you fall."

My breath caught in my throat. Four to seven was still too long, a small lifetime, but it wasn't twenty-five.

Valerie went on, her tone shifting to the details. "You're a first-time offender. White collar. Nonviolent. They'll recommend placement in a lower security facility. Danbury is the most likely option, or another women's prison close enough for Eric to visit. But you need to understand this isn't guaranteed. The prosecution will argue for the higher end of the range. I'll fight for the minimum. In the end, it'll be the judge's call."

I stared down at the table, the cheap wood laminate blurring under my vision. Four years wasn't freedom, but it wasn't stepping out of a cell with gray hair, trying to catch up to a life that had long ago forgotten me.

It was survivable.

Finally, I forced myself to look up. My voice was quiet, but it didn't shake. "What do you think?"

Valerie studied me for a long moment, her gaze weighing me like she could see the fractures beneath my skin. Then, she folded her hands over the folder. "I think this is the best deal you'll get. The prosecution is out for blood, Emma. This keeps you from bleeding out."

I slowly nodded once. She slid the pen across the table. My fingers curled around it, clumsy, like they weren't mine. My signature came out jagged, foreign, as if it belonged to someone else entirely.

When I pushed the folder back to her, I finally met her eyes. My voice was flat, but it was the most steady I had felt in a long time. "Then we've got a deal."