5. Jace
FIVE
JACE
Ten days into the fake engagement, and the galas had started running together into one long, over-glamorous evening of donor lists and rented smiles.
Jace kept his hand at the small of Emma’s back the whole walk out of the ballroom, and told himself, same as every other time tonight, that it was strictly for the cameras.
It was not strictly for the cameras.
“Two more names for the list.” Emma kept her voice low, chin tipped up, playing at admiring the chandeliers instead of counting exits—she’d started doing that on her own now, without him teaching her, and he tried not to read too much into how fast she’d picked it up, or how much it pleased him that she had.
“The couple by the bar funneled money through the same shell as the elder-care trust. I’d bet my license on it. ”
“Duly noted.” He steered her toward the parking structure, smile fixed for the two donors still watching from the coat check. Three hours of playing devoted fiancé and his jaw ached—not from the performance. From wanting it to stop being one. “Good work in there.”
“I always do good work. You’re only noticing because you’re contractually obligated to stand this close to me.”
“I noticed before the contract.”
That got her. She missed a step, recovered fast, and he tucked the reaction away with satisfaction.
“So,” she said, once the ballroom was well behind them, “the woman in emerald asked how we met. I told her you tripped over your own feet trying to get my number.”
“I didn’t trip.”
“You barreled out of an office, made a beeline for the men’s room, and steamrolled me on the way. I was there.”
“Different story than the one you told the donor five minutes ago.”
“The real story doesn’t play as well at a gala.
Mine has better pacing.” She adjusted her bag strap, and he caught the wince she tried to hide when it pulled at her shoulder—three hours in heels she’d complained about since the valet line, not that she’d once slowed down for it.
“Also, yours makes you sound competent, and I’m not currently in the business of inflating your ego. You’ve had a good week already.”
The garage swallowed the gala noise the second the door shut behind them—concrete, sodium light, the dead hush of a place built for cars instead of people. Jace’s pace didn’t change. Everything under his skin did.
Two cars he didn’t recognize, parked wrong for valet. Engines cold—they’d been sitting a while. A man near the exit ramp checking his watch three times in the span it took Jace to blink twice.
Every hair on his arms stood up at once.
Not tonight. Not with her.
“Keys are in my bag,” Emma said, reaching for it.
“Leave the bag. Move.” Even. No room in it for negotiation.
She caught the shift in him before he finished the sentence, dropped the argument she hadn’t even started, and let him steer her toward the stairwell instead of the car.
They didn’t make it.
Four of them came out of the shadows between parked cars at once—fast, coordinated, boxing both exits before Jace finished counting heads. Ski masks. Tactical gear under civilian jackets. No guns drawn, and that absence was its own kind of warning.
Capture. Not kill.
Worse, not better.
“Behind me.” He got a forearm across her collarbone and had her against the pillar before the nearest attacker finished his first step.
That one moved wrong for a civilian—weight already forward on the balls of his feet, too balanced, the stillness of someone trained rather than scared.
Shifter. Jace clocked it and didn’t slow down.
She didn’t stay behind the pillar.
Her heel came down through a car window a beat later, alarm shrieking, headlights strobing red-white-red across the concrete, and three more alarms went off in quick succession as she worked the row with the drilled, deliberate precision of someone who’d practiced exactly this.
Deliberate. Loud. Exactly the kind of chaos four men counting on a quiet grab couldn’t afford.
Later, we are discussing the definition of behind me. Half fury. Half a feeling disturbingly close to pride.
Then the first man reached him and there was no room left in his skull for anything but the fight.
He let the wolf up.
Not the full shift—no room in a parking garage for that, and she was too close to risk what the control would cost—but enough.
Claws instead of nails. His vision snapped gold at the edges, sound narrowing to breath and boots on concrete.
One directive: clear the space, keep her upright, worry about the rest later.
The first man swung a fist that would’ve broken a human jaw. Jace caught it out of the air, bone giving under his grip, and had the man on the ground with a wrist bent the wrong direction before the scream finished leaving his throat.
The second came in low, trying for his knees.
Jace pivoted, claws opening a line across the man’s forearm deep enough to send him stumbling backward into a parked sedan hard enough to buckle the door—another alarm shrieking to life on top of the first four, the whole garage lit up like a carnival gone wrong.
The third had a collapsible baton and knew how to use it, fast enough that a human opponent might’ve landed the hit.
Jace wasn’t human right now. He caught the strike on his forearm, the shock of it rattling up into his shoulder, and put the man down with a single blow that cost him more restraint not to make lethal than it did to throw.
Blood in the air, sharp and copper. Sweat, adrenaline, too many car alarms going off at once. His pulse hammered somewhere outside normal human rhythm—every cell in him down to one calculation. Threat. Not-threat. Her.
Roman’s van screamed into the garage sideways before Jace finished with the third man, Diesel out the passenger door before it stopped rolling.
“Evening, gentlemen.” Roman, grinning ear to ear, waded in without breaking stride.
Diesel went straight for the man nearest Emma and put him down in two moves that looked almost gentle from a distance.
Emma’s fourth alarm cut out.
The silence hit Jace like a slap. His head snapped toward her on pure animal instinct, found her upright, unhurt, backed against a support pillar with a tire iron gripped in both fists and every intention of using it—
—and he didn’t see the last man until the man was already moving.
He came from the blind side of the pillar. Shoved her hard enough that her cheekbone cracked against raw concrete, hard enough that Jace heard the impact from thirty feet away over the alarms and the fighting and his own pulse roaring in his ears.
Something moved through him then that went past fury and didn’t have a name yet. Her. Down. Blood already welling along her cheekbone. Nothing else in the garage existed.
He crossed the distance in under two seconds, claws out, vision gone fully white-gold, and the man who’d touched her did not get back up.
Jace stood over him for one full breath, chest heaving, every animal instinct screaming to finish it. It took real, physical effort to step back—to remember there were rules, a team watching, a woman on the ground who needed him steady more than she needed him dangerous.
He turned. Emma was already pushing herself up on one arm, refusing to stay down even now, and his chest cracked wide open at the sight of her trying.
“Get him talking,” Jace said, breathing hard, wolf receding under his skin in slow, furious increments he had to force one at a time. “I want a name.”
Roman knelt beside the last conscious attacker and went very still—the kind of still that meant bad news before he opened his mouth. “Boss.”
Lips already blue. Foam at the corner of his mouth.
A hollow tooth or a capsule under the tongue—somebody had made sure none of them could talk before the fight even started, which told Jace exactly how organized the people behind this were, and exactly how little they valued the men they’d sent to do the dying.
He crouched beside the body anyway, checking pockets out of habit more than hope—no wallet, no phone, no insignia on the tactical gear that would tie back to anyone.
Professional in the worst way. Somebody had spent real money making sure a dead man told them nothing, and that silence said more than a name would have.
Emma had gone wide-eyed at the sight of it, tire iron still gripped white-knuckled in one hand, watching a man die on concrete six feet away in a way that told him she was tucking the image somewhere she wouldn’t get to unpack later.
Jace noted it. One more thing to deal with once the immediate danger stopped being immediate.
“Dead in under a minute.” Roman wiped his hands on his jeans, visibly insulted by the whole encounter.
“Every damn time. Nobody attacks during a reasonable dinner hour anymore either. Always the parking garage. Always right when I’ve got plans, and always with the poison capsules, which, frankly, feels like overkill for hired muscle. ”
“You didn’t have plans,” Diesel said.
“I had potential plans. Same thing.”
Jace didn’t join the argument. He was already crossing to Emma, blood running down her cheekbone in a bright thin line that locked his ribs up so hard it hurt to breathe past it.
“Let me see.” His voice came out rough, rougher than he could remember it coming out in years, and his hands—hands that had broken bone and opened flesh minutes ago without one second of hesitation—were not steady when he caught her chin and tipped her face into the light.
The cut ran shallow along her cheekbone, ugly but survivable.
Her wrist, cradled against her stomach, had already swollen tight and shiny at the joint.
“I’m fine.” Fast. Automatic. The kind of lie people told when they were anything but.