5. Jace #2
“You’re not fine. Hold still.” He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket, and the hands that hadn’t shaken once through four broken bones and one dead man trembled now, careful in a way that had nothing tactical left in it, pressing the cloth to her cheek like she might shatter if he pressed too hard.
Emma went still under his hands, watching his face instead of her own wound. “You’re shaking.”
“Aware of that.”
“You took down four men without blinking.”
“That part was easy.” He kept his eyes on the cut, on the careful pressure of his own fingers, because looking directly at her right now was more than he could survive. “This isn’t.”
Surprise crossed her face, then a quiet he hadn’t seen on her before. “I’m more scared of how much I trust you already than I am of them,” she said, low enough it barely carried past the two of them. “I’ve known you two weeks.”
“Twelve days.”
“Twelve days, then. Which makes it worse, not better.” She looked down at his hands, unsteady against her cheek, trying to reconcile them with the hands that had broken bone across the garage minutes ago.
“I don’t let people in fast. I don’t usually let people in at all. And you didn’t even have to try.”
“I’ve been trying since the elevator.”
“That’s not the same as succeeding.”
“No.” Low. Certain. “But I’ll take it.”
The words he might have said next got buried under Roman clearing his throat from a very deliberate ten feet away, and the moment folded itself shut before either of them could do a single thing with it.
The safe house looked, from the outside, like every other brownstone on a block built to discourage attention—which was, Jace thought, hauling Emma up the front steps with one arm banded around her waist, the entire point.
“I don’t need to be carried.”
“You’re not being carried. You’re being assisted.” He didn’t loosen his grip an inch. “There’s a difference.”
“The difference is imaginary.”
“The difference is you nearly went down twice in the last block, and my imagination isn’t what’s holding you up right now.”
She didn’t argue that one. First real concession of the night. He pushed the door open into warmth and low light and the smell of coffee somebody had brewed hours ago and forgotten.
Emma stopped arguing somewhere around the front hall, and Jace understood why the second he caught his own reflection in the hallway mirror—jaw locked, eyes still faintly gold at the edges, a man who’d spent the last hour white-knuckling his own control in front of the one person he most needed to stay steady for.
She looked at that face and didn’t say another word about locks or apartments or alarm systems. She let him get her to the couch.
Let Milo take the wrist with quick, competent hands.
Watched Jace the entire time, unfinished business plain on her face.
“Sprained, not broken.” Milo worked fast, efficient for once instead of running commentary. “You’ll hate me in about six hours when the adrenaline wears off.” He glanced at her cheek, already cleaned, already closing. “Won’t scar. Small mercies.”
“Good to know my modeling career survives.”
“Forensic accounting’s loss,” Milo said, dead serious, and packed up his kit.
Roman trailed in a few minutes later, jacket torn at the shoulder, looking far more pleased with the evening. He dropped onto the arm of the couch, took in her bandaged wrist and doctored cheek with a critic’s eye. “You held that tire iron like you meant it. Impressed.”
“I did mean it.”
“I know. That’s why I’m impressed.” He glanced at Jace, grin dropping into a flat, serious line for exactly as long as it took him to say, “She’s tougher than the last three protection details combined, boss,” before it snapped back into place.
“Also, for the record, I had a date tonight. A good one. Kidnappers ruin everything.”
“Your date can wait.”
“My date is now my third date, because I texted an apology from the van, and she said, quote, ‘as long as nobody died,’ which”—he glanced toward the body bags loading into an unmarked vehicle outside—“is a conversation I am not having with her tonight.”
Diesel appeared in the doorway and set a mug of tea in front of Emma without a word. She took it, startled, and he vanished again, muttering to himself about a stray cat he’d spotted near the van.
Jace left her to the team and went to stand in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed.
This stopped being a job days ago. I stopped pretending otherwise around the time I stopped being able to.
Tucker found him there twenty minutes later, laptop under one arm, expression carefully blank in the way that meant bad news underneath it.
“Pulled the dash cam and a phone off the van.” Tucker set the laptop on the counter, turned the screen. “You’re going to want to see this before she does.”
Jace crossed the kitchen in three strides. The photo filled the screen—Emma, mid-stride, coat collar up, auburn hair loose from its pins, timestamped days before Jace had ever caught a stack of folders outside a ballroom.
“Recognize the building?”
“Of course, I recognize it.” He stared at the timestamp until the numbers stopped being numbers and started being a threat instead. “That’s the night before Gerri ever called me in. Before I even knew her name.”
“Which means whoever’s running this wasn’t watching her because of you.
” Tucker’s voice had gone careful. “They were watching her before you existed to them at all. You didn’t paint the target on her back, boss.
You only noticed it was already there, which is a very different thing to carry around. ”
That was supposed to make him feel better.
It didn’t. Not even remotely close.
“Someone had eyes on her before you did.”