2. Jace #2
“Good. That’s the idea.” She patted his cheek—a gesture he’d feel again in about five minutes, from a woman with considerably less patience for his nonsense. “Eat your food. I love you. I’m still setting you up with the doctor.”
“I ran into someone last night,” Jace said, before he’d fully decided to say it, and regretted it instantly.
His mother went very still, fork halfway to her mouth, radar fully deployed. “Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I don’t know her name.”
“He knows what she smells like, though,” Roman offered, mouth full, entirely unhelpful.
“Roman.”
“Contributing to the historical record.”
His mother’s whole face lit up, complicated and delighted at once—the look she’d worn the day he made varsity, the day he took over the pack’s protection contracts, the day he told her he was starting his own company.
“Well.” She folded her hands in her lap, the satisfied gesture of a woman handed the only Christmas present she wanted. “This is going to be fun.”
The badge reader beeped twice, gave up utterly, and Gerri Wilder walked through, the building apparently having extended her a personal invitation.
Roman, camped at the front desk, shot up so fast, his chair rolled into the wall. “That door needs a keycard and a retinal scan—how did you—”
“Did it.” Gerri didn’t slow down. “How fascinating for the door.”
She crossed the executive floor in heels that refused to make a sound, which was its own kind of threat, cut straight through the conference room doors without knocking, without an appointment, without the faintest concern that Jace was mid-call.
Perfectly bobbed hair and pure, undiluted intention, and every person on the floor gave her the kind of wide, instinctive berth wolves give a presence they can’t classify but know, on some old animal level, outranks them.
“Gerri.” Jace stood. Some habits outlived his patience for surprise visits. “You have an appointment system with the company. I built it specifically for you.”
“I’m aware. Adorable that you thought it’d work.
” She patted his cheek on the way past—the same gesture she’d used on a real estate mogul less than twenty-four hours earlier, apparently dispensed equally to alphas and billionaires, a full tactical assessment disguised as affection—and dropped into the chair at the head of the table.
His chair. Nobody had ever successfully explained that to her. “You look terrible.”
“I slept four hours. This is what that looks like.”
“Your wolf got hit by a truck last night and hasn’t stopped pacing the cage since. It shows.” She said it like ordering a sandwich. The back of his neck went hot. “I found her.”
“Found who.”
“Don’t.” Her eyes sharpened, gold flickering at the edges the way it did when she stopped finding a thing funny and started finding it useful. “You know exactly who. I’ve known you since you were eleven and sulking about a training exercise. I’m not sitting here watching you pretend.”
Jace opened his mouth to argue—arguing with Gerri on principle was a house tradition—and got exactly one syllable out before she slid a folder across the table and ended the conversation early.
A photograph, clipped to the front. Green silk. Mid-stride, caught leaving a building under exterior lights, auburn hair coming loose from its pins, chin up, somewhere to be and zero patience for anyone slowing her down.
Every word Jace had queued up evaporated on the spot.
“Careful. You’ll catch flies.” Gerri tapped the photo once and moved on before he could recover.
“Emma Burke. Forensic accountant. Certified fraud examiner. Seventeen years taking down people who steal from people, most of it for free, all of it terrifyingly good.” She watched his face fight itself and lose.
“She found a thread in my books last night that has no business existing. Which means somebody out there already knows she found it.”
“How bad.” Not a question. His voice dropped into the register the team had learned to leave alone.
“Bad enough I want your best on her before the end of the week.” Gerri tapped the photo again, precise.
“Pattern across three of my charities, minimum. Somebody’s been bleeding my foundations for years, doing it well enough that six accountants missed it completely, and Emma Burke found it in one night without trying particularly hard. ”
“You think whoever’s running this already made her.”
“I think a woman that good doesn’t stay invisible for long, and I think the people I’m dealing with don’t wait around to find out.
” A shadow crossed Gerri’s face and was gone before he could name it.
“She has no idea what she’s stepped into.
I need someone who can keep her breathing long enough to finish the job.
Preferably someone already invested in the assignment. ”
She didn’t smile saying it. Didn’t need to.
Jace’s wolf, restless since ten forty-five the night before, stopped pacing entirely—for the first time since the ballroom, dead still, the stillness of a predator that had finally found the one thing worth guarding with teeth.
A low sound rolled through his chest, not quite a growl, not quite anything he’d bothered naming before now, and he didn’t try to swallow it back down.
“I’ll take it.” The words came out before Gerri finished exhaling, low and certain, no room in them for negotiation.
“I hadn’t finished the sentence.”
“Don’t need to.”
Gerri studied him a long moment, satisfaction settling over her features, a little smug at the edges—she’d known the answer before she walked in and had simply enjoyed watching him arrive at it himself.
“Good.” She stood, gathering her things with the brisk finality of someone who’d never once doubted the outcome. “I’ll have Tucker send over her contact information. Try not to terrify her in the first ten minutes—you’ve got a face that does that to civilians who don’t know you’re harmless.”
“I’m not harmless.”
“No.” She stopped at the door, the corner of her mouth curling up. “But you’re about to become her favorite kind of dangerous. That’s rather the point.”
She left the way she’d arrived—no permission, no badge, and no argument left standing.
The call came in at nine, long after his parents had gone home and Roman’s betting pool had grown to four names and one deeply concerning wager involving a raccoon.
Tucker’s voice cut through the comms, clipped and fast, all the usual humor drained out of it. “Boss. You need to hear this.”
“Go.”
“Badge log at one of Gerri’s charity offices flagged an entry two hours after Emma Burke walked out of it with an armful of files.
No alarm tripped, no forced door—whoever went in used a working keycard, moved through the building for eleven minutes, and left the way they came.
” The tapping of Tucker’s typing didn’t slow.
“I pulled the access history. Whoever it was knew the server room’s layout well enough to hit every camera blind spot on the first try.
That’s not luck. That’s someone who’d walked that building before, more than once, and planned the route in advance. ”
Someone who knew what they were looking for. Someone who’d known within hours that Emma had found a thread worth stealing.
Jace absorbed that in total silence, jaw locked, hands flat on the console like the only thing keeping them there was the effort of not putting them through it.
“Pull the badge ID. I want a name by morning.”
“Badge is registered to a vendor account that hasn’t been used in six months, boss. Whoever did this borrowed someone else’s access on purpose.” Keys clattered on the other end. “This was hours after she left. Somebody’s watching her already.”
Jace didn’t answer right away. Didn’t need to. A decision had already locked into place in his chest, clean and absolute, the kind he didn’t revisit once made.
“Nobody touches my client.”
Or my mate.