2. Jace
TWO
JACE
“Diesel, hold the gallery entrance till Priya’s people clear the walkthrough, then rotate north.” Jace didn’t hesitate in his office building’s lobby, badge out, the guard at the desk already stepping back. “Roman. Tell me the transport route’s still clean.”
Three ops running at once and not one person on his payroll had asked an unnecessary question all morning. They didn’t need to. Even though he wasn’t at any of the locations, he was four moves past what they were about to ask, same as always.
“Clean, boss. Ran it twice.” Roman’s voice crackled in, parking-garage echo under it. “Also, I want it on record that I called the second tunnel a bad idea back in March and nobody listened.”
“Third time you’ve said that.”
“Fourth. I’ll keep saying it till somebody buys me a drink about it.”
Jace didn’t smile. Didn’t need to—Roman would clock it anyway, some shift in the air the whole team had learned to read years ago.
“Milo. How’s the patient?”
“Boring, which I love.” Papers shuffled on the other end. “Ribs are healing clean, he’s cleared for desk duty, and I’ve informed him that wolf skin does not repel bullets. Also I’m not doing this again with a patient who bites.”
“Tucker.”
“Cameras up on all three sites. Got an unregistered car circling the gallery block twice in ten minutes—could be nothing, could be somebody casing the place. Sending Roman the plate.”
“Copy.” Jace took the stairs to the executive floor two at a time out of habit rather than urgency, shoulders rolling loose the way they only did when his wolf had spent the night pacing instead of sleeping, and told himself the two things weren’t related.
They were.
His office sat at the end of the floor—dark wood, black leather, desk angled to watch the door because old habits didn’t retire only because the war did. No photographs anywhere. Sentiment was a liability in his line of work, and he’d learned that lesson so early, he couldn’t remember learning it.
There was a name he still didn’t say out loud, a war and a continent removed from the reason he’d learned it, and habits built on graves didn’t get gentler with time.
He dropped into the chair, pulled up two feeds, and reached for the coffee Diesel had left on his desk sometime before dawn without being asked.
His hand closed around the mug hard enough to test the ceramic.
He set it down. Flexed his fingers. Told himself it was nothing.
It was not nothing. It hadn’t been nothing since ten forty-five last night, when a woman with an armful of ledgers walked straight into his chest and every instinct he’d spent a decade leashing broke loose in one hot, ungovernable second.
He’d caught her before she hit the ground—hands moving faster than thought, same as they always did for anyone he could reach in time.
That part made sense. What didn’t make sense was everything after.
Four seconds with her folders in his arms and his whole body had gone on point, treating her as a threat instead of a woman who smelled like ink and rain-damp wool and a warmth underneath both that had made his teeth ache.
He’d run those four seconds on a loop from midnight until now, the way a man checks a wound to gauge how bad it is. It was worse. He’d led men through firefights without his pulse changing. A stranger’s elbow in his hand had done more damage than most of his combat record.
My wolf’s opinions are not appropriate for a professional engagement.
He went back to the feed. It solved nothing, and he knew it.
Roman didn’t knock. Roman had never knocked in four years and wasn’t about to start, shouldering through the door with two coffees, already grinning like he’d smelled gossip a floor away.
“You’re doing the thing.” He dropped one coffee on the desk hard enough to slosh over the rim, folded himself into the chair with the proprietary comfort of a man paying rent on it, and grinned—built like a wall that had wandered into tactical operations out of spite, a grin that had gotten adversaries killed underestimating him more than once, currently aimed at Jace with the precision of a loaded weapon.
“The staring-at-nothing thing. Twice in the briefing. Twice in the elevator.”
“I don’t have a thing.”
“You’ve got several things. This one’s new.” Roman kicked his boots onto the edge of the desk, which earned him a look that would’ve sent a smarter man home early. He left the boots where they were. “So. Who is she?”
Jace considered denial. Considered, for one full second, the dignity available to men who simply didn’t answer. Then he did the math on how long Roman could sit there being smug in total silence—infinite, the answer was infinite—and decided honesty cost less.
“Ran into someone at the gala.” Flat. Nothing in his voice to suggest it mattered. His hands, gripping the mug again without his permission, disagreed. “Literally walked into me.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Caught her. She apologized, visibly offended by the whole situation. Handed back her files. She left. Over in seconds.”
“You don’t get that face over nothing, boss.” Roman pointed his coffee at him, a broad accusing sweep that took in Jace’s whole posture, his jaw, the mug he was strangling again without noticing. “What was her name?”
Silence.
“You don’t know her name.”
“No.”
“You held a woman for several seconds, and you don’t know her name.” Roman set his coffee down with actual reverence. “But you know more than that. I can see it on you. What?”
Jace exhaled, long and put-upon, a sound that fooled exactly nobody in this building. “Ink. Rain on wool.” His jaw ticked. “Warm.”
“Warm.”
“That’s what she smelled like.”
Roman stared at him for a solid three seconds before he lost it—a laugh that came from somewhere deep and unfair, rough enough that it had made grown mercenaries reconsider their life choices mid-firefight.
“You noticed her scent and skipped the name. This is the best thing that’s happened to me all year, and I once watched Diesel adopt a raccoon he swore was a very small, very angry dog. ”
“It’s not a thing.”
“It’s a whole thing wearing a trench coat.
” Roman pulled out his phone, grinning in a way that spelled disaster for Jace’s Tuesday.
“Starting a pool. How long before you do anything catastrophically un-alpha. Poetry. Memorizing her coffee order by scent alone, which, let’s be honest, you’re already halfway to.
Adopting a dog because it reminds you of her. ”
“Don’t start a pool.”
“I’m absolutely starting a pool, and Tucker’s buying in within the hour, and Milo’s going to win the whole thing, because Milo always wins these and none of us know how, which stopped being funny and started being concerning about a year ago.
” Roman stood, unrepentant, coffee in hand.
“Four years, boss. Four years I’ve been waiting to watch you get hit by this exact truck. I’m not missing it for anything.”
He left before Jace could throw anything at him, which, in hindsight, was the smarter move for both of them.
His parents showed up at half past noon with enough takeout to feed the floor and an agenda about as subtle as a flare gun.
His mother swept through the lobby with the ease of a woman who owned the deed—which, technically, she partly did—and had a container of his father’s short ribs on Jace’s desk before he’d finished standing.
“You’ve lost weight.” She looked him over the way she’d been reading his face since before he could talk, found a detail to disapprove of, and set about fixing it with volume. “Eat. Roman, sit, you look like protein bars and bad decisions with a pulse.”
“Accurate on both counts,” Roman said, headed straight for the food container.
Jace’s father dropped into the chair across the desk with the easy calm of a man who used to run an entire pack and now regarded corporate security as a mildly interesting hobby his son had taken up. “Gallery op smooth?”
“Clean so far.” Jace turned the monitor toward him, grateful for ten seconds of conversation that wasn’t about his love life. “Wraps up by two.”
“Good.” His father gave the screen a few whole seconds of real interest before his mother reclaimed the room.
“I ran into Marguerite Okafor’s daughter at the farmer’s market.” She said it to the room at large, unpacking a second container with the brisk efficiency of a woman laying tactical groundwork. “Lovely girl. Doctor. Single.”
“Mom.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“You’re running a pincer maneuver with short ribs as cover.”
“Your father taught me everything I know about strategy, and I’ve never once used it on an enemy who deserved it less than you.
” She handed him a fork—a peace offering that doubled, unmistakably, as a threat.
“You’re thirty-four. You run one of the best security firms on the East Coast. You’ve personally kept half the packs in this city alive.
And you go home every night to an apartment with no photographs in it and a fridge that, last I checked, held mustard and the sad remains of a rotisserie chicken. ”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been avoiding this for a decade, and I’ve let you, because I’m patient, and because your father swore you’d figure it out eventually.
” The teasing dropped, for one second, into a note steadier than the rest—the kind that made Jace’s shoulders drop half an inch.
“No security company protects you from being lonely, sweetheart. That’s not a threat I can help you plan for. ”
The room went quiet in a way it rarely did around this family. Roman developed a sudden, consuming interest in his short ribs.
“I find that more alarming than actual gunfire,” Jace said, mostly to break the silence, and his mother’s laugh cracked the tension clean in half—bright, real, the sound that used to fill their kitchen on ordinary days.