9. Jace
NINE
JACE
Walter didn’t answer his phone that night, or the night after.
Emma went to his building anyway, badge and fury and half a dozen questions loaded and ready, only to find his office already cleared out, no forwarding address, like the man had simply stopped existing the moment his face hit that security feed.
Jace talked her out of chasing further—not because the anger wasn’t earned, but because a confrontation with no leverage behind it would only warn a man with thirty years of practice covering his tracks to disappear for good.
So they’d waited instead. Watched. Kept building the case in silence and let the nights that followed be, for once, almost normal.
A few nights after the Kane Foundation gala, Roman had the whole table on its feet with glasses raised before the waiter finished pouring. “To the world’s least convincing fake engagement. May it continue to convince absolutely nobody.”
“That’s not a toast. That’s an insult wearing a garnish.”
“It’s both.” Roman clinked his glass against Jace’s without waiting for permission. “Sit down. Eat a steak. This is mandatory alpha morale, ordered by me, effective immediately.”
“You can’t order mandatory anything. You don’t outrank me.”
“I outrank you in fun. Different scoreboard.” Roman dropped into the booth, Diesel sliding in beside him, quick and quiet, claiming the seat facing the door before anyone else thought to want it.
Tucker took the end, laptop bag still over one shoulder even at dinner, and Milo slid in last, phone already out, thumbs going a mile a minute.
A waiter arrived with bread and a wine list Roman waved off without a glance. “Bring the good bottle. The one we don’t let Diesel order because he picks based on label color.”
“The label color is a legitimate metric.”
“It is not, Diesel, that’s how we ended up with a bottle that tasted of pure candle wax.” Roman shuddered at the memory. “I still think about that bottle. I think about it more than I think about several ex-girlfriends.”
“Get that looked at.”
“I see you people four nights a week. That’s basically therapy.
” Roman stole a piece of bread off Tucker’s plate without looking, an old reflex that Tucker didn’t bother fighting anymore.
“Anyway. Reenactment time. I want to know exactly how the collision went the night you met, and I want Diesel to play Emma.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’ve got the shoulders for it,” Diesel said, dead serious, already half-rising, the casting decision apparently finalized in his own head.
“Sit down, Diesel.”
“I would’ve caught the folders with more grace than you did,” Diesel added, sitting back down, unbothered.
“Nobody asked for the record.”
“Who are you texting,” Jace asked Milo, mostly to redirect four grown men away from reenacting the worst four seconds of his composure.
“Nora.” Milo didn’t look up. “She’s out with Emma right now. Girls’ night. I’m getting excellent intelligence.”
“That’s a security risk.”
“That’s gossip, boss, and gossip’s the best security risk there is.” Milo’s phone buzzed. He read it, grinned, and to nobody’s surprise and everybody’s mild horror, read it aloud without being asked. “Nora says, quote, ‘this is going exactly how I predicted, give me twenty more minutes.’ Unquote.”
“You weren’t supposed to share that.”
“Nora didn’t say it was classified. I’m a first responder, not a vault.” Milo’s thumbs hadn’t stopped, drafting a reply with a surgeon’s total concentration. “This is the most compelling entertainment I’ve had all month. I’m not turning it off.”
Jace’s own phone buzzed in his jacket. He checked it under the table with the furtive speed of a teenager, which he was fully aware of and chose not to examine.
Table of six wolves at a bar arguing about wine. Cannot decide if this is your life or a sitcom pilot, Emma had written, no context, no explanation needed.
It’s both, he typed back. Currently losing an argument about wine label colors.
Diesel?
Who else?
Tell him I said label color IS a legitimate metric and everyone doubting him is a coward.
He was grinning at his phone, foolish and unguarded, by the time he looked up, and found the entire table watching him do it.
“Who’s that?” Roman asked, far too casual.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody made your face forget how scowling works.” Roman leaned across the table, delighted, predatory in the way he only got around a genuinely good piece of gossip. “Is that her? Tell me that’s her.”
“Drink your wine.”
“That’s a yes. I’m calling it a yes.” Roman turned to the table at large, arms spread, delivering the verdict with the relish of a judge who’d been waiting all week for this exact ruling.
“For the record, official ruling: Emma Burke has ruined this man’s ability to function as a scowling, unfeeling brick wall, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier about it. ”
The steaks arrived. The wine kept flowing. Somewhere around the second bottle, Roman leaned back with the satisfaction of a man circling in on a point he’d been saving all night.
“You’ve smiled more in the last two weeks than the previous two years combined. I’ve been keeping an informal count.”
“I smile.”
“You smirk. Different muscle group entirely. This”—Roman gestured at Jace’s whole face with his fork—“is smiling. I’ve seen it four separate times since the accountant walked into your life.”
“It’s the mission. Keeping her comfortable keeps her cooperative.”
“That’s the worst lie you’ve ever told me, and I watched you convince a federal judge you weren’t carrying a concealed weapon while carrying two.”
“I wasn’t lying to the judge.”
“You were absolutely lying to the judge. That’s not the point.” Roman set his fork down, all the teasing gone out of his voice at once. “The point is you’ve never once smiled at a mission in your life. Missions don’t do that. People do that.”
Diesel, who rarely offered opinions unprompted, offered one now. “You checked her wrist brace twice tonight before we even left the house. That’s not tactical assessment. That’s a man who can’t stop looking.”
“I check everyone’s injuries.”
“You checked Milo’s stitches once, six months ago, because I made you.
” Diesel went back to his steak, matter settled as far as he was concerned.
He let a beat pass before adding, without looking up, “For what it’s worth, boss, we like her.
All of us. In case that mattered to the decision you haven’t made yet. ”
Jace looked around the table—Roman still grinning, Diesel already back to his steak like he hadn’t just said anything remarkable, Tucker’s phone lighting up with what was almost certainly pool-related traffic, Milo’s thumbs still moving under the table—and found, for once, that he didn’t have an argument left in him worth making.
“My wolf recognized her,” he said, quiet, before he’d fully decided to say it out loud, and huffed a short breath at his own clumsy phrasing. “Not—it wasn’t some instant, both-sides thing. Mine did. The second she walked into me, before either of us said a word. I’ve never doubted it once since.”
Nobody at the table had a joke ready, which almost never happened around this group of men.
Roman didn’t make a joke. He set his glass down, reached over, and clapped Jace once on the shoulder—firm, wordless, saying more than any speech out of him could have.
“Yeah,” Roman said. “We know, boss. We’ve known for two weeks. We were only waiting for you to catch up.”
The moment held for exactly three seconds before Milo’s phone buzzed again, and he ruined it without an ounce of remorse.
“Nora says Emma went quiet for a full minute and she thinks a breakthrough’s happening over there too.
Do I confirm one’s happening here, or does that count as a security breach? ”
“Milo.”
“I’m asking the real questions, boss.”
Emma Burke
Nora had a way of asking questions that turned silence into its own confession, which was, Emma suspected, the entire point.
The bar she’d picked sat two floors up from the street, all exposed brick and low gold light, the kind of place that wore its two-drink minimum as a personality trait.
Nora had claimed a corner table before Emma finished taking her coat off, already flagging down a server with the confidence of a regular, though as far as Emma knew, she’d never set foot in this bar in her life.
“So.” Nora set two cocktails down on the small round table, claimed the chair across from Emma with the brisk authority of a woman taking a deposition, and got straight to it. “How’s the fake engagement?”
“Fine.”
“That’s not a real answer. Try again.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Also not a real answer. I’ve told you a hundred times, ‘complicated’ isn’t a complete sentence; it’s a hiding place.
” Nora took a long sip of her drink, patient the way only a woman who’d interrogated grieving families at three in the morning could be, with absolutely no intention of losing to a forensic accountant with a wine glass.
“I’ve watched you avoid this conversation for two weeks.
I let you have those two weeks out of love.
That love has an expiration date, and it expired approximately five minutes ago. ”
“You gave me five minutes?”
“I gave you five generous minutes. I could’ve started the second you sat down. Consider yourself lucky I have manners.”
“You don’t have manners.”
“I have selective manners. They’re reserved for people who aren’t obviously in love and lying about it.” Nora pointed a finger across the table, triumphant. “Ah-ha. Saw that flinch. That was a guilty flinch.”
“That was a normal amount of blinking.”
“That was the blink of a woman with a secret.” Nora’s phone buzzed.
She glanced at it, grinned, and turned the screen around without ceremony—a photo Milo had sent of the boys’ table, Roman mid-toast, Jace visibly unimpressed in the background.
“Milo says they’re forcing your fiancé into a reenactment of how you two met.
I give it thirty seconds before Diesel volunteers to play you. ”