16. Jace
SIXTEEN
JACE
Tucker’s voice cut through the kitchen radio and every plan Jace had for the morning collapsed at once.
“Trucks are already on-site. Kane’s crews are staging heavy equipment at the disputed parcel, and I count at least twenty armed men spread across the tree line. This isn’t a survey team. This is a full seizure operation.”
“How long until they can start real work on the ground?”
“Less than an hour, if they’re moving equipment already.” Tucker’s voice had gone tight. “Boss, if he breaks ground before we get an injunction filed, the legal argument doesn’t matter anymore. Possession becomes nine-tenths of a very ugly law.”
Jace was moving, adrenaline and fury both sharpening into a plan clean and useful, wolf snarling somewhere under his ribs at the thought of strangers standing on his family’s land with guns. “Get me pack warriors. Full team. Roman, Diesel, suit up now.”
“On it.” Roman had his tactical vest half-buckled before the order finished leaving Jace’s mouth.
Diesel appeared in the doorway already dressed, checking the load on a rifle, calm as breathing. “Warriors are assembling at the north gate. Your father’s already coordinating positions.”
“Good. I want a perimeter locked down before anyone gets close enough to see our faces.” Jace pulled his own gear on fast, hands steady despite the fury building low and constant in his chest. This was his land.
His people. Twenty armed strangers had no business standing on ground his family had bled for, and every instinct he owned wanted blood back in return.
Emma caught his arm on the way past, laptop already open, eyes bright with the sharp focus she got when a difficult problem finally had an angle she could work. “Give me twenty minutes with Walter’s files before you move. I think there’s a legal weapon in here nobody’s found yet.”
“We don’t have twenty minutes.”
“Then give me ten, and trust me to run fast.” She kissed him, hard and quick, no hesitation in it at all. “Go save the land. I’ll save the paperwork. We meet in the middle.”
He caught her face in both hands before she could turn away, kissed her again slower, deliberate, one hand sliding into her hair like he was committing her mouth to memory, and pulled back only when his wolf started arguing about letting go at all.
“Ten minutes,” he said, low. “Then I want you at the command vehicle, behind the line, no exceptions. If I have to come find you, we’re having a conversation you won’t enjoy.”
“I’ve heard that speech before.”
“I mean it more this time.” He nipped her lower lip, quick, possessive, and let her go before he lost the argument with himself totally.
The Northern Forest Preserve at dawn had the quiet of a place about to become an entirely different kind of morning.
Jace’s wolf knew this ground the way most men knew their own hands—every dip in the terrain, every deadfall, every place the light came through the canopy wrong and turned the forest floor to shadow.
Kane’s mercenaries had satellite maps and professional training and absolutely no feel for the land at all, which was the only advantage that would matter once the shooting started.
“Warriors are in position,” his father’s voice came low over the comms, steady despite thirty years removed from leading a fight this personal. “Waiting on your word.”
“Hold until we’ve exhausted the legal option. I want this bloodless if it can be.”
It couldn’t be. He knew that even as he said it, watching Kane’s crew chief wave men toward the heavy equipment despite three separate warnings that the property’s legal status remained contested.
Emma’s voice crackled through his earpiece, breathless, triumphant.
“Got it. There’s a clause buried in the original trust deed—decades back, the pack partnered with the Wilder Hope Foundation to shield the corridor under a conservation easement, and the land can never transfer ownership without direct approval from Gerri’s charitable trust. Nobody updated the county filing when the trust reorganized eleven years ago.
Legally, Kane’s crew is trespassing right now, this second, and I’ve already sent the documentation to three separate federal contacts. ”
“Beautiful work.”
“Tell them to stop before I have to say I told you so in a deposition.”
He raised a hand, signaling the negotiator team forward with the injunction paperwork Emma had created before they left, and for one suspended moment, it looked like it might genuinely work—Kane’s crew chief frowning over the documents, radioing someone for instructions, the whole operation slowing to a wary stall.
Then the first shot cracked across the clearing, and every careful plan went to pieces at once.
Jace shifted before the echo finished traveling, clothes tearing away as bone and muscle rearranged themselves into a shape the mercenaries’ training hadn’t remotely prepared them for.
He hit the nearest gunman before the man’s second shot cleared the chamber, driving him into the dirt with a force that ended the confrontation permanently.
A second man swung a rifle stock at his head; Jace ducked under it, closed the distance, and put him through a fallen log hard enough to snap the trunk in half.
A third came from the flank with a blade meant for a wolf’s throat—Jace caught the wrist in his jaws instead, bone giving under the pressure, and moved on before the man finished screaming.
The forest exploded into chaos around him—pack warriors shifting in staggered waves, mercenary rifles answering with controlled, disciplined fire that told him exactly how much money Kane had spent making sure this fight wouldn’t be easy.
It wasn’t easy. It also wasn’t close. This fight was Kane’s, not the Chairman’s—the architect never showed his own face on a battlefield—but Jace’s wolf knew every root and hollow of this ground the way Kane’s hired guns knew nothing at all, and that difference started mattering within the first thirty seconds and never stopped.
Emma Burke
Emma and Jace’s mother made it to the command vehicle, where his mother shifted and joined the fight, and Emma watched the battle unfold live, Tucker’s voice a steady thread in her ear, and the moment Jace’s body broke apart into a shape massive and dark and lethal, her whole chest went tight with a feeling she still hadn’t found a clean word for.
“Wolves are engaging,” Tucker reported, voice clipped. “Pack’s got the terrain advantage. Mercenaries are falling back toward the tree line, but they’re not retreating clean. Somebody’s directing a rear guard.”
“Casualties?”
“Two of ours down, nothing fatal so far. Mercenaries taking far worse.”
Through the trees, Emma caught glimpses of the fight in fractured pieces—Jace’s massive form driving through the mercenary line like nothing in it had a vote, Roman and Diesel holding the flanks in human form, the whole forest ringing with sounds that belonged nowhere near a peaceful morning.
She’d stopped being afraid of the sight of him fighting a while ago.
She was afraid of what could happen to him instead, and that fear had teeth she hadn’t fully accounted for.
“Emma, movement on your flank—”
The blast hit before Tucker finished the sentence.
The world went white and deafeningly loud all at once, the ground dropping out from under her, and then there was only ringing silence and the taste of copper and dirt against her teeth.
She came back to herself slowly, disoriented, ears still screaming, and found Jace’s face inches from hers, still half wolf, gold bleeding out of his eyes as the shift reversed itself mid-motion, blood streaked across one cheekbone, saying her name like it was the only word left in his vocabulary.
“Emma. Emma, look at me. Stay with me. Emma—”
His hands were shaking. Jace Maddox, who ran into gunfire without blinking, who had moments ago put three armed men down without breaking stride, had hands shaking so badly, he could barely get them steady against her face, and the sound tearing out of his chest wasn’t a word at all—it was low and wrecked and utterly involuntary, a sound she’d never once heard from him before.
“I’m here.” Her voice came out thin, wrong. Her whole body ached in ways she couldn’t yet catalog. “What happened?”
“Secondary charge. Kane’s people rigged the retreat route.
” His hands moved over her, checking her pupils, her pulse, cataloging every visible mark on her, and his breathing had gone ragged in a way the fight alone didn’t explain.
“You went down. You went down and you didn’t move for four seconds and I have never in my life—I couldn’t get to you fast enough, I have never once in my life moved that slow—”
“I’m okay.” She caught his wrist, holding on, feeling the tremor running through him. “Ribs hurt. Head’s spinning. I’m okay, Jace. Look at me. I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay, you were unconscious. I watched you go down and not move, and I have killed men for considerably less than what happened to you.”
“Jace.” She said his name like an anchor, cutting straight through the dark place his wolf was circling. “I need you to hear me. I’m alive. I’m talking. Ground yourself, and then go finish this, because the faster this ends, the faster nobody else gets hurt.”
That landed. She watched it, watched the wild static behind his eyes settle into a calm he could genuinely use, and he pressed one hard, bruising kiss to her forehead before forcing himself upright.
“I’m not leaving you unguarded.”
“Your mother is here, and I have a headset and considerable spite. Go.”
He didn’t move immediately. He stayed crouched over her one more second, jaw working, visibly fighting the animal urge to plant himself between her and the entire rest of the world and never move again—and then, with visible effort, he tore himself away.
Emma pushed herself upright despite the protest from every part of her body, grabbing for the headset that had been knocked loose. “Tucker, are you still there?”
“Emma—thank god. What’s your status?”