14. Jace #2
“I understand completely. Tell him not to bleed on the navy suit; it’s dry clean only.” The line went dead before Emma could respond, and she found herself laughing, wet and disbelieving, in the middle of a firefight.
Walter’s hand found her wrist in a lull between exchanges, grip weak but insistent.
“Chairman,” he managed. “Kane doesn’t run this. He’s never run this. There’s a man above him—decades ahead of him—the Chairman built the whole acquisition strategy long before Kane was ever recruited. Kane’s only the face. The Chairman’s the architect.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know his name. Nobody does. He’s never been in a room that could connect back to him.” Walter’s breathing had gone thin, wet at the edges. “The map. Inside the envelope. Every property he already controls, and the last piece he needs to close the ring. You have to see it before—”
“Walter.” Emma pressed both hands hard against the wound in his side, some useless part of her still trying to buy him time she knew he didn’t have. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner? Years ago. Before any of this.”
“Because I was ashamed, and shame’s a coward’s excuse for staying quiet.
” His eyes found hers, clear for one last moment despite everything.
“You were always the better accountant, Emma. I used to tell myself that was jealousy talking. It wasn’t.
You never once let yourself become convenient to people who didn’t deserve you.
I did. I let it happen slowly enough that I stopped noticing the difference. ”
“That doesn’t undo it.”
“No. But it’s true anyway, and I wanted you to hear it from me instead of reading it in a file.” His grip weakened further. “You were the best student I ever had. I’m sorry it took me twenty years and a bullet to prove it mattered to me.”
His hand went slack in hers before the sentence found its end, and the fight left his face all at once, the way it does, final and complete and nothing like the movies made it look.
Emma held onto his hand a moment longer than she needed to, throat tight, grief tangled with fury she didn’t have time to sort through yet, and tucked the envelope deep inside her jacket where nothing short of a body search would find it.
“Emma!” Jace’s voice, human again, raw with the effort of pulling the wolf back under control. He crouched beside her, blood on his shoulder that wasn’t his own, eyes still edged gold. “Are you hit?”
“I’m fine. Walter’s gone.”
His jaw tightened, grief and fury both crossing his face at once, and he pulled her against his chest for one hard, brief moment, mouth pressed to her hair, before urgency won out again. “We need to move. Roman’s got a breach charge on the tree line to cover our exit.”
Roman’s controlled breach went off thirty seconds later, a wall of fire and displaced earth that swallowed the access road behind them and left Kane’s remaining mercenaries with nothing to chase but smoke.
They ran the forest route Tucker had mapped that morning, Diesel bringing up the rear with Walter’s body draped carefully over one shoulder because, in his words, “nobody gets left in a parking lot, that’s not how this works,” and Emma ran with the envelope pressed flat against her chest the entire way, heart pounding a rhythm that had nothing to do with exertion.
Jace, breathing hard, fell into step beside her without a word, one hand at her elbow to steady her over the uneven ground. Neither of them spoke until the vehicles came into view.
They broke out of the tree line into the waiting vehicles, and the drive back to the safe house passed in a blur of adrenaline finally catching up with all of them at once, Jace’s hand never once leaving hers the entire ride.
The bedroom “medical suite” smelled like antiseptic and the particular quiet that follows violence once the adrenaline finishes leaving the room.
Emma sat on the bed beside Jace, watching Milo stitch a shallow gash along his shoulder where a round had grazed him during the shift, and found she couldn’t stop looking at the blood still drying along his jaw.
“Hold still,” Milo said, unfazed, like the amount of violence he’d recently cleaned up after was simply another day. “You’d think after this many years you’d learn to duck.”
“Ducking’s for people without backup.”
“That’s not how ducking works, but I respect the confidence.” Milo finished the last stitch, taped a bandage over it, and packed up his kit fast, brisk, well past counting how many times he’d done this. “You’re both cleared. Try not to need me again this week.”
He left them alone, and the quiet that followed sat heavier than the firefight had.
Emma reached for a damp cloth from the tray beside the table and started cleaning the last of the blood from Jace’s jaw, careful, slow, her hands finally steady now that there was a small, useful task to occupy them.
“I watched you become a creature I don’t have a word for tonight.
” Her voice came out quieter than she meant it to.
“I wasn’t scared of you. I need you to know that.
I was scared for you, watching you throw yourself at four armed men without a second’s hesitation, and it hit me somewhere around the third exchange of gunfire that if I lost you tonight, I wouldn’t know how to be a person again.
That’s not a sentence I’ve ever said out loud about anyone. ”
Jace caught her hand, stilling it against his jaw, and pulled her fully into the space between his knees, both arms banding around her waist in a grip he clearly intended to make a habit of.
“Tonight, I watched you drag a dying man behind a wall under live fire, and the only thought in my head was that I would burn this entire city down before I let anything touch you.” His voice had gone low, rough at the edges.
“That’s not protector and client anymore, Emma.
It isn’t even boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.
It’s two people running this fight, side by side, fully equal, no matter what comes next.
Whether it’s Kane or the Chairman or a threat we haven’t even found yet, we face it as one unit, or we don’t face it at all. ”
“As one unit,” she echoed, and kissed him, careful of the stitches, fierce despite it, hands fisting in his shirt like she had every intention of never letting the distance open back up between them.
Diesel appeared in the doorway a moment later, apparently not registering that he’d interrupted anything, and deposited two coffees on the counter without comment.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, already turning to leave, “you’re officially qualified for wolf family chaos now. Most people take months. You did it in one firefight. Efficient.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”
“It’s the highest compliment I have.” He was gone before she could argue further.
Roman leaned into the doorway a moment later, jacket torn at one shoulder, not sparing it a glance. “Formally requesting we never use a church as a meeting point again. I’m not a religious man, and even I’m starting to take this personally.”
“Thank you, Roman.”
“That’s all I ask.” He knocked twice on the doorframe and left them to it, footsteps fading down the hall toward the next problem waiting for all of them.
Emma laughed despite herself, despite the grief still sitting heavy under her ribs, and reached for the envelope she’d tucked inside her jacket hours ago. The seal gave easily. Inside sat photographs, financial records, and a single map, hand-marked, corners soft with age.
She spread it across her lap and traced the marked properties one by one—the pattern the Chairman had spent decades building, laid out in faded ink exactly where Walter had promised it would be.
Her finger stopped on the final circle, drawn in red, fresher than the rest.
The blood drained slowly from her face.
“Jace.” Her voice had gone very quiet. “The acquisition order has changed.”
“How? What are they taking next?”
She turned the map so he could see it, and watched his own face go still.
The circle sat directly over Maddox Pack territory.