12. Emma #2
Jace hit her at a dead run, taking them both to the floor, his body curling protectively over hers as debris rained down around them—burning timber, plaster, a support beam that would have caught her square across the back if he hadn’t put himself directly between it and her.
The impact landed across his shoulders instead, a sound like a fist against solid wood, and he absorbed it without more than a sharp exhale through his teeth, his arms locked around her head and the files both, refusing to let either go.
Dust and embers rained down for three long seconds that refused to end, heat licking close enough to Emma’s exposed skin to sear it, and then, as suddenly as it started, the worst of it settled.
“Jace—”
“I’m fine.” His voice came out rough, strained, entirely unconvincing, blood already welling from a shallow cut along one temple. “Move. Now, while the gap’s clear.”
He hauled her up and half-carried her through the smoke toward the exit, one arm banded around her waist, the files crushed between them, and they broke into open air in a stumbling rush of coughing and adrenaline, collapsing onto the grass a safe distance from the building as it finished its slow collapse behind them.
Milo appeared long enough to check Emma’s pupils with a penlight and, having seen far worse over the years, declared her “annoyingly fine” before rounding on Jace with a much sharper eye. “You. Shoulder. Now.”
“It’s fine.”
“That’s not a diagnosis, that’s a lie you tell people so they stop asking.
” Milo peeled back the torn shoulder of Jace’s shirt without waiting for permission, revealing a bruise already blooming dark and ugly across the muscle beneath, and dabbed the cut on his temple with antiseptic that didn’t get so much as a flinch.
“For a man who took a support beam, you’re being remarkably casual about it. ”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That’s not the flex you think it is.” Milo taped a compress over the worst of it, muttering the whole time about stubborn alphas and their complete inability to sit still for even a minute, and left with a final warning glare that promised a longer lecture once the adrenaline wore off.
Jace crouched in front of Emma, ignoring his own shoulder fully, and reached up to brush a line of soot from her cheekbone with a gentleness that didn’t match the exhausted fury still simmering behind his eyes.
“Talk to me,” he said, quiet, and the low, rough edge to his voice told her exactly how much the last hour had cost him too, whether he intended to admit it out loud or not.
“It was worth it.” She coughed, chest still raw from the smoke, and pressed the files tighter against her chest. “Forty-two staff. Three shelters. A children’s clinic.
Every one of them depends on what’s in these folders, and I wasn’t going to let Kane erase two decades of proof because a fire made it inconvenient for me to be brave. ”
“I know.” His hand cupped her jaw, slow, like he needed the contact as much as she desperately did.
“I’ve known since our second week that you were going to run into buildings for people you’d never met.
I told myself it was a professional liability.
It took me far longer than it was supposed to, admitting it’s the reason I can’t picture my life without you in it anymore. ”
Emma went still, the oxygen mask forgotten in her lap. “That’s a significant thing to say to a woman covered in soot.”
“I’ve never been good at picking my moments.” He leaned in and kissed her, slow and soot-streaked, not caring in the least about the ash between them, one hand cradling the back of her head like she was infinitely breakable and infinitely worth protecting anyway.
Gerri arrived a moment later, having apparently recovered enough of herself to reassemble the performance, though her grip trembled faintly when she reached out and pulled Emma into a hug fierce enough to bruise.
“You absolute lunatic.” Gerri held on a beat longer than strictly necessary, then pulled back and immediately busied herself smoothing invisible wrinkles from Emma’s soot-ruined blouse, which fooled absolutely nobody. “Checking for smoke damage. Purely practical.”
“Purely practical,” Emma agreed, letting her have it.
“Also, the arsonists picked the one night in recent memory I wore decent shoes.” Gerri glanced down at the ruined heels with genuine, wounded outrage. “These were Italian. I want that noted in every report written about tonight.”
Jace, watching the two of them from a few feet away, let a certainty settle into place that he didn’t bother naming out loud.
Gerri didn’t hug people like that unless they already belonged to her.
Emma had walked into this family somewhere between a fake engagement and a burning building, and nobody in it, least of all him, was going to let her walk back out.
Tucker found them an hour later, standing near the wreckage with a recovered phone bagged in evidence plastic, his expression grim in the way that meant the night wasn’t finished handing out bad news.
“Pulled this off one of the mercenaries. Damaged, but I got one message off it before the drive corrupted.” He held the screen out, the recovered text glowing pale against the dark.
Board meeting moved. Eliminate the accountant before she arrives.
Emma read it twice, the smoke-raw ache in her chest turning colder by the second, the words settling into her bones with a weight the smoke in her lungs hadn’t put there.
Roman, reading over Tucker’s shoulder, went very quiet—a stillness that sat wrong on a man who filled every silence by default, the sort that meant he was already three moves into planning an operation nobody had authorized yet. “That’s not a threat. That’s a schedule.”
“They’re not done,” Emma said.
“No,” Jace agreed, already reaching for her hand, his grip closing around hers like he had no intention of letting a single inch of distance open up between them again tonight. “Not even close.”
Gerri, still holding her ruined shoes in one hand, looked out at the smoldering remains of the archive building with an expression that had gone strange and dangerously calm.
“Well, if Victor Kane wants a war, I do hope he’s prepared for the version of me that doesn’t send fruit baskets afterward.
He picked the wrong charity to set on fire, and he’s going to discover that in excruciating detail. ”
“That’s the spirit,” Roman said, and for once, nobody laughed.
Emma looked down at the deeds still clutched in her arms, ash-smudged but intact, two decades of proof that had nearly cost her everything to save.
Somewhere behind her, sirens still wailed as the last of the fire trucks worked the storage buildings into submission, and somewhere upstate, past all of it, sat the pack land Jace refused to lose an inch of.
The scale of what they were truly fighting had stopped feeling abstract somewhere around the moment the ceiling came down on top of her, and she doubted it would ever go back to feeling abstract again.
“We need everything on that board member,” she said, quiet, mind already racing past the smoke still sitting heavy in her lungs toward the next move.
“Whoever it is, they’ve had access for years.
That’s not a small betrayal. It’s a wound that goes all the way to the bone, and it’s going to take real time to heal. ”
“We’ll find them,” Jace said, and the certainty in his voice left no room for doubt. “Whoever they are, they’re not getting close to you again. Not while I’m still breathing, and not after either, if I have any say in the matter.”