16. Jace #2
“Bruised, rattled, absolutely furious. Sever their communications. Now. If Kane’s field commander can’t coordinate his own men, this ends faster and with fewer people bleeding.”
“On it.”
Emma coordinated from the command vehicle with Tucker running interference in her ear, watching through the trees as Jace found the mercenary field commander—a broad-shouldered shifter directing his retreating men with the calm of someone who’d clearly done this exact job many times before—and put an end to the man’s calm permanently.
The fight that followed was brutal and fast, wolf against wolf, both of them massive and lethal and utterly without mercy, and Emma made herself watch every second of it despite her body’s every instinct to look away.
The commander got in one solid strike, claws opening a line across Jace’s flank that would have staggered a lesser animal, and for one heart-stopping second Emma’s whole body locked with the certainty that she was about to watch the worst moment of her life happen right in front of her.
Jace kept coming. He absorbed the hit, closed the distance in a single driving lunge, and ended the fight with a decisiveness that left no question about who this land belonged to.
She owed him that much. She owed him the truth of watching what he carried so she’d never again underestimate exactly what loving him cost.
He won. But the way he won—teeth and fury and four decades of restraint finally given full permission, still visibly rattled underneath it from the four seconds he’d thought he’d lost her—revealed a piece of the man underneath the composure that she suspected he’d spend considerable effort trying to hide from her later.
The mercenary line broke within minutes of their commander going down, retreating in a scattered, disorganized rush that Roman and the pack warriors harried all the way to the property line and no farther, per Jace’s standing orders about not chasing anyone onto contested ground.
By the time the smoke cleared enough to survey the damage, portions of the forest had burned in patches, three pack members needed real medical attention, and Emma’s ribs had settled into a deep, insistent ache that promised to get a great deal worse before it got better.
Milo found her first, kit already open, checking her pupils fast and precise, the opposite of alarmed despite the blast still ringing in everyone’s ears. “Mild concussion, bruised ribs, nothing broken as far as I can tell without proper imaging. You got lucky.”
“Doesn’t feel lucky.”
“Compared to the alternative, it absolutely was.” He taped a proper ice pack into place and pressed it gently against her side. “Keep this on for twenty minutes. If the headache gets worse instead of better, you tell me immediately, not three hours from now when you’ve decided it’s fine.”
“Understood.”
“I mean it, Emma. I’ve patched up enough stubborn people this month to fill a small hospital wing, and every single one of you thinks the rules apply to everyone except yourselves.
” He packed his kit with a pointed look that suggested he’d already guessed exactly how she planned to handle the next few hours, and moved on to the next injured warrior without waiting for her to argue.
Jace found her sitting on the command vehicle’s rear step twenty minutes later, human again, blood and ash streaked across most of his visible skin, and the look on his face when he saw the ice pack pressed to her ribs nearly undid her composure entirely.
He crouched in front of her without a word, cupped her face in both hands, and kissed her slow and thorough, like he was reassuring some animal part of himself that she was still breathing under his mouth.
“I need you to hear this,” he said, forehead dropping to hers, voice raw in a way she’d never once heard from him.
“Watching you go down in that blast was worse than anything in that fight. Worse than anything I’ve faced in my life, mate bond or not.
I have led this pack through fires and ambushes and things I don’t talk about, and none of it cracked me open the way four seconds of you not moving did. ”
“Jace—”
“I need you to understand what that means before you tell me you’re fine again.
” His hands found hers, gentle despite the tremor still running through them.
“It means I don’t know how to survive losing you.
I built an entire company on the promise that I’d never fail to see a threat coming for someone in my care, and I still didn’t see this one coming fast enough. ”
“You got to me in seconds.” Her voice wavered, exhaustion and adrenaline both catching up with her at once.
“You got to me before I even finished hitting the ground. That’s not failure, Jace.
That’s the opposite of failure. That’s exactly the partnership I signed up for—the one where you don’t get to carry every danger alone, and neither do I.
I’m hurt. I’m not gone. There’s a difference, and I need you to hold onto it, because I am not going anywhere. ”
He pulled her in carefully, mindful of her ribs, and pressed his face into her hair, neither of them saying anything else, the whole scorched clearing settling into a fragile, hard-won quiet around them.
Roman limped over first, jacket torn at both shoulders, seemingly unaware he was bleeding.
“I want it noted that the enemy commander cheated. Biting isn’t a recognized tactic in fair combat, and I intend to file a formal complaint with absolutely no one, because there’s no one to file it with, but I’m saying it out loud anyway. ”
“Fine, Roman.”
“Thank you. Also somebody owes me a new vest. This one has a bite mark in it now, and I refuse to wear a haunted vest.”
Gerri arrived on the heels of that announcement, sweeping into the clearing with two enormous casserole dishes and an expression that dared anyone to question her timing, heels sinking into scorched earth without a single complaint about the state of her shoes.
“I heard there was a battle and assumed correctly that nobody would remember to eat afterward. Warriors never do. It’s very inconvenient for their mothers. ”
“Gerri, the battle ended a few minutes ago.”
“And I have excellent timing.” She set the dishes down on the command vehicle’s hood as though the scorched earth and the lingering smoke were simply part of the catering challenge, and turned her attention to Emma with a fierceness that softened the second she took in the ice pack and the careful way Emma was sitting. “Oh, darling.”
“I’m fine, Gerri.”
“You’re visibly not fine, but I respect the commitment to the lie.” Gerri pressed a hand briefly to Emma’s cheek, uncharacteristically gentle, before straightening and reclaiming her usual brisk energy. “Eat. Both of you. I didn’t drive out here with casseroles to watch them go cold.”
Diesel emerged from the tree line last, a scorched first-aid kit slung crosswise over one shoulder and a pack warrior leaning on him for support.
“Anders is favoring his left side. Somebody get Milo before he decides he’s fine.” He said it as a statement of fact rather than a request, lowering the man onto the tailgate with more care than the moment strictly required.
“You’re not usually the one giving orders,” Roman said, eyebrows up.
“Somebody has to. You’re all terrible at triage.” Diesel didn’t look at anyone and headed for the food dish.
Jace helped Emma to her feet like she might come apart in his hands if he moved too fast, one arm banding around her waist to take the weight off her ribs, and the two of them surveyed the scorched clearing side by side—the parcel saved, the pack intact, the cost written plainly across every burned acre and bandaged shoulder in sight.
“We won,” Emma said, quiet.
“We won.” Jace’s shoulders carried every scorched tree like a personal failure, regardless of the outcome. “It cost more than it needed to.”
“It cost less than it would have without you leading that fight, and you know it.” She leaned into his side, ribs protesting the movement, fully unwilling to let him carry the guilt alone. “You saved this land. You saved your people. Let yourself have that.”
He didn’t answer right away, but his arm tightened around her, and that was answer enough.
Somewhere behind them, Jace’s father surveyed the same clearing, settled and unhurried.
He’d seen worse than this and rebuilt from it before.
“The land holds,” he said, quiet, to no one in the group directly, and there was enough history in the words that Emma understood exactly what he meant without needing it explained.
“It holds,” Jace agreed, and pulled Emma a fraction closer, the words clearly meant for more than the ground under their feet.
Miles away, in an office with a view Emma would never see, a phone lit up with a single line of confirmation.
Parcel lost. Commander dead. Federal filing already in motion.
The reply came back within seconds, entirely untroubled by the scale of the failure it addressed, the words of a man who had already moved past grief and straight into recalculation.
Land first is finished. Take the accountant. Break the wolf. Everything else follows from that.