14. Jace
FOURTEEN
JACE
The message hit Emma’s phone at nine at night, and Jace watched her face change before she’d finished reading the first line.
“It’s Walter.” She turned the screen toward him, the phone trembling faintly in her grip. “He says he has proof tying Kane to every fraudulent acquisition. He says Kane’s going to kill him. He wants to meet, tonight, in exchange for protection.”
“Walter Pierce doesn’t get to want anything from us.” Jace crossed the room in three strides, every protective instinct in him snapping fully awake. “He helped rob you blind, Emma. He walked thieves into a building on camera. Forgive me if my sympathy’s a little thin.”
“I know what he did.” She set the phone down, spine just as rigid as his.
“I also know he taught me everything I know about this job, and if he’s telling the truth, he’s the only person alive who can tell us how to permanently stop this.
I’m not turning down proof because I’m angry at the man handing it over. ”
“Being right doesn’t make it safe.”
“Nothing about my life has been safe since a gala weeks ago, and you were standing right there for most of it.” She crossed her arms, chin up, daring him to argue the point. “You don’t get to play the safety card now, not after everything we’ve already survived.”
Jace studied her, the fury and the fairness both sitting plain on her face, and let the growl building low in his chest lose its argument the way it always did when she made a call he hated and turned out to be right about it anyway.
“Fine.” He was already reaching for his jacket, the whole operation taking shape behind his eyes before she’d finished nodding.
“We do this my way. Full team, full perimeter, and if anything about that meeting point feels wrong, we’re gone before he finishes his sentence.
No exceptions, no matter what he claims to have. ”
“Understood.”
“I mean it, Emma.”
“I said understood.” She caught his hand on the way past, laced her fingers through his, and pressed a brief, hard kiss to his jaw, lingering half a second longer. “I’m not interested in dying for Walter Pierce’s redemption arc. I only want the truth.”
He caught her waist before she could pull away, tugged her back against him, and kissed her properly this time—slow, thorough, reassurance that meant a good deal more than it let on. “That’s better,” he said, against her mouth.
“That was blatant manipulation.”
“Effective manipulation.” He let her go, moving for the door. “Gear up.”
Tucker had the meeting coordinates up on the command center screen before either of them made it downstairs, a red pin blinking on a stretch of forest north of the city that made Jace’s jaw tighten the second he saw it.
“That’s isolated.” Tucker didn’t look up from his monitor, already pulling satellite imagery. “No cell coverage for half a mile in any direction, one access road in and out. If I were setting a trap, I’d pick that exact spot, specifically because it looks defensible to the people walking into it.”
“If Walter’s setting a trap, he’s not smart enough to hide it.” Roman checked the charge on his sidearm with the ease of long habit. “If somebody’s using Walter to set a trap, that’s a different problem, and considerably more likely.”
“Which is why nobody goes in blind.” Jace pulled up the map, already building the perimeter in his head, wolf pacing restless under his skin at the thought of walking Emma into an unknown space.
“Diesel and Roman take the tree line thirty minutes ahead of us. Tucker, eyes on that road the second anything moves. Emma and I go in, side by side. If this goes wrong, it goes wrong with the whole team already in position, not scrambling to catch up after the fact.”
Emma caught his eye, steady despite the danger sitting plain in every word he’d said, and nodded once. That was enough.
The rendezvous point sat off a forest access road twenty minutes north of the city, an abandoned church gone dark and hollow against the tree line, stained glass catching moonlight in fractured colors that did nothing to soften the place.
“Of course it’s a church.” Roman’s voice crackled low through the earpiece, perimeter already swept. “Every villain in this city has the same taste in real estate. I want it on record that abandoned churches need a reservation system at this point. There’s clearly a waiting list.”
Jace kept his eyes on the tree line, Emma close at his side, one hand curled loosely around her hip where nobody but her could feel it. “Diesel, north perimeter. Roman, south. Tucker, eyes on the road.”
“Copy,” came back twice, clean and fast.
Emma’s phone buzzed once. She glanced down, then up at Jace, uneasy. “He says he’s already here.”
They crossed the gravel lot, side by side, the church’s broken doorway a black mouth ahead of them, and a shape staggered out of the shadows before they’d covered half the distance—a man Jace recognized from Emma’s case files, older than his photographs, hollowed out in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with two decades of choices finally catching up with him at once.
Walter Pierce was bleeding from a wound low on his side, one hand pressed hard against it, the other clutching a sealed envelope like it was the only thing keeping him upright.
“Emma.” His voice came out thin, wrecked. “You came.”
“Walter, what happened to you—”
“They were behind me. I didn’t lose them, I only slowed them down.
” He pressed the envelope into her hands with a grip that had nothing left in it but urgency.
“Everything’s in there. Every acquisition, every shell company, every name.
But there’s one fact you need before you do anything else, because you’re about to make a mistake that gets you killed.
” His breath caught, wet and uneven. “Kane isn’t the one you should fear—”
Headlights swept across the lot.
Emma Burke
Four vehicles converged on the church at once, doors opening before they’d fully stopped, and the first shots cracked off the gravel a half-second later.
“Down!” Jace’s voice tore through the gravel and the gunfire, and he’d put himself between Emma and the nearest line of fire before the word finished leaving him—and then the sound that came out of his chest stopped being anything close to human.
Emma had seen him fight before—the parking garage, the warehouse, hands and speed and controlled violence. She had never seen this.
His body broke apart and remade itself in the space of one breath, clothes tearing, bones rearranging with a sound that registered in her ribs more than her ears, and where a man had stood a half-second earlier there was now a creature massive and dark and utterly lethal, amber eyes gone molten gold in the dark, every ounce of the leashed power she’d always sensed under his skin finally, absolutely unleashed.
He hit the first attacker before the man’s gun finished rising, and the fight that followed had nothing careful left in it at all.
Claws opened a line across a mercenary’s forearm and sent his weapon skittering into the dark.
A second man got off one wild shot before eight hundred pounds of muscle and fury drove him into the church’s crumbling stone wall hard enough to bring down a section of it.
A third came at Jace’s flank with a knife, and Jace caught the man’s wrist in his jaws and threw him bodily into the fourth attacker behind him, both men going down in a tangle of limbs that didn’t get back up.
He moved low and fast between cover, closing distances, and every attacker who got within reach went down and stayed down.
“Emma, move!” Roman’s voice cut through the chaos, already firing controlled bursts from the tree line. “Get Walter behind the wall, now!”
She grabbed Walter’s arm and hauled him toward the crumbling remains of the church’s foundation, his weight dragging heavy and wrong against her shoulder, blood soaking warm through her sleeve.
Rounds sparked off stone inches from her head.
Another mercenary rounded the corner of the foundation almost on top of her, and Emma swung the only weapon she had—a chunk of broken masonry—hard into the side of his knee.
He went down screaming, and Roman finished the job from twenty feet out without breaking stride.
She didn’t stop moving until she and Walter were both behind the wall, chest heaving, his breathing gone shallow and fast beside her.
Jace moved through the mercenaries like an idea nobody had properly planned for.
Emma caught glimpses between breaths—a man thrown clear across the lot, another put down before he’d finished raising his weapon, Diesel and Roman converging from the flanks to close every gap Jace’s fury left open.
It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t meant to be.
It was four decades of pack instinct given full permission for the first time tonight, and by every reasonable measure it was supposed to terrify her.
It didn’t. It made her chest ache with something that wasn’t fear at all.
A mercenary broke from the tree line and sprinted straight for the wall where Emma crouched with Walter, weapon rising, and Jace closed the gap between them before the man could get off a single round, one massive paw driving him face-first into the dirt with enough force to end the argument permanently.
Gold eyes found Emma’s for one suspended second—checking, cataloging, making sure she was whole—before he turned back into the fight without a sound.
Her phone buzzed against her hip in the middle of it, absurd and insistent. She answered without thinking, adrenaline overriding judgment.
“Darling, is everyone alive?” Gerri’s voice, bright and entirely unbothered by the gunfire audible through the phone. “I only ask because I need Jace at the Hendricks luncheon Thursday and dead men make terrible dinner company.”
“We’re a little busy, Gerri—”