17. Emma
SEVENTEEN
EMMA
Every screen in the command center went dark at once, then flickered back to life with the same message repeated across a dozen monitors, and Emma’s coffee mug slipped clean out of her hand.
Tomorrow, I take your mate.
The feed cut to grainy security footage a half-second later—a quiet suburban street, a modest house with a blue door, a woman loading groceries into her car with absolutely no idea two unmarked vans had parked across the road from her for the last twenty minutes.
“That’s Claire.” Emma’s voice came out strangled, barely her own. “That’s my sister’s house. That’s my sister, Jace.”
Tucker was typing, three windows open at once, shoulders hunched tight over the keyboard. “I’m tracing the broadcast source now. Whoever sent this routed it through half a dozen relay points, but I’ll have an answer inside a few minutes.”
“We don’t have a few minutes.” Jace had his phone to his ear, voice gone cold and lethal, a growl riding underneath every word. “Roman, Diesel, wheels up in ninety seconds. Tucker, I want everything you can pull on that street in the next sixty.”
“I’m coming.”
“Emma—”
“That is my sister, and I am coming, and you can either put me in the car willingly or I will find my own way there, and one of those options is considerably faster.” She grabbed her jacket, hands shaking with an adrenaline that owed nothing to fear for herself.
“Don’t waste time arguing with me. Waste time getting us there. ”
He looked at her for exactly one second, weighing it, and the look on her face ended the argument before it started. “In the car. Now.”
They made the drive in twenty-two minutes that felt like twice that, Jace’s hands white-knuckled on the wheel, and Emma spent the entire ride running worst-case scenarios she immediately, deliberately refused to finish thinking.
Claire’s street looked exactly like the footage when they arrived—quiet, ordinary, two unmarked vans still parked across from a house with a blue door.
Roman and Diesel peeled off before the car fully stopped, moving in fast and low, and Emma was out of her seat and running before Jace could tell her to stay put.
“Emma, wait—”
She didn’t wait. Her sister was inside that house.
The first man came around the side gate as Emma reached the porch, weapon swinging up, and something in Jace broke its leash entirely at the sight of a weapon pointed at the house Claire was standing inside of—he closed the distance in a single stride and put the man down on the porch boards with brutal, undisciplined force, his usual precision burned clean off completely.
A second man came through the hedge behind the mailbox, and Jace caught his wrist mid-swing, twisted until the joint gave, and used the man’s own momentum to drive him face-first into the porch railing, a low snarl tearing loose from somewhere underneath language entirely.
“Emma, get inside!”
She didn’t. She grabbed a fallen branch off the lawn and swung it hard into the back of a third man’s knee as he rounded the corner toward Jace’s blind side, sending him sprawling, and Roman finished the job with two efficient strikes before the man could recover his footing.
“Nice hit,” Roman said, already zip-tying the man’s wrists.
“I had a good teacher.”
Another tried the back door; Diesel intercepted him with the calm efficiency of a man who did this before breakfast most days.
He crouched to zip-tie the man’s wrists, glanced at the flower bed the scuffle had trampled, and added, entirely to himself, “Somebody’s going to want to replant those begonias,” before straightening like the observation settled the matter.
The whole operation took ninety seconds and ended with four unconscious men zip-tied on Claire’s lawn and Emma’s sister standing in her own doorway in socked feet, staring at the scene with the frozen horror of someone whose ordinary morning had turned unrecognizable in the space of a minute.
“Emma, what is happening?”
“I’ll explain everything, I promise, but I need you to pack a bag and come with us right now.” Emma pulled her sister into a hard, fast hug, checking her over with her hands the way she’d watched Jace do it a dozen times now. “You’re safe. You’re going to stay safe. I need you to trust me.”
Claire looked past her shoulder at Jace, at Roman zip-tying a man to a mailbox with cheerful efficiency, at the general chaos of her front lawn, and made a decision with the same speed her sister usually did. “Give me five minutes.”
“Take ten,” Emma said, already scanning the street for any sign of a second wave. “We’re not leaving until you’re genuinely ready.”
Claire climbed into the car eight minutes later with a duffel bag half-zipped and her hands still shaking too hard to manage her seatbelt.
Roman twisted around from the front seat, delighted.
“Hi. I’m Roman. I’m the one who tied two of the men trying to grab your sister to your mailbox.
Welcome to the family, unofficially, no pressure. ”
Claire stared at him, then at her sister. “Is he always like this?”
“Yes,” Emma and Jace said, at exactly the same time, and Claire let out a short, slightly unhinged laugh that did more to loosen her shoulders than anything Emma had said in the last ten minutes.
The idea had been circling Emma’s head since the drive back, and she waited until they were alone before she said it out loud.
“He wants me.” She kept her voice level, testing the words before committing fully to them.
“Every move he’s made points at me specifically.
What if I gave him what he wants, on our terms instead of his?
Controlled location, full team in position, Tucker running comms. We turn his own trap into ours. ”
Jace’s whole body went rigid, and the look he turned on her stripped every trace of patience off his face at once.
“No.”
“Jace, listen—”
“No.” The word came out low, absolute, a growl riding under it that raised the hair on her arms. “You’re not bait.
You’re not a chess piece I sacrifice to win a game.
I’ve watched you get hurt twice, and both times I’ve had to physically stop myself from doing a thing none of us would recover from.
I won’t stand in a room and watch you walk voluntarily toward a man who has already tried to kill you three times. ”
“I’m not asking your permission to be brave. I’m asking you to help me be smart about it.”
“There’s no smart version of you inside that man’s reach.” He crossed the room in two strides, hands framing her face, and for a moment, the fury cracked enough to show the terror underneath it. “Emma. My wolf doesn’t negotiate on this. I don’t negotiate on this. Find another way.”
“There isn’t another way. I’ve looked.”
“Then we keep looking.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, gentler than his voice had been a second ago. “I need you to promise me you’ll drop this.”
She didn’t answer right away, and the silence itself must have worried him, because his grip on her tightened.
“Emma.”
“I hear you.” It wasn’t a promise, and she was careful to make sure it didn’t sound like one either, though she suspected he heard the difference and simply chose, in that moment, to let it go rather than fight her on it twice in one night.
Emma found him alone in the basement hours later, the whole house finally quiet, Claire asleep in a guest room under Milo’s watch and the rest of the team scattered to their own version of decompressing.
He stood at the window with his back to her, shoulders still carrying the tension from their argument, and she crossed the room and pressed her forehead flat between his shoulder blades without a word, letting the silence do what an apology couldn’t yet.
“I keep thinking about how close that was.” His voice came out low, rough.
“I know.” She pressed her cheek between his shoulder blades, feeling the muscle there still coiled tight under her palms. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going through your head right now, not the tactical summary, not the version you give the team.”
He turned to face her, jaw working, and for a long moment, said nothing, the words needing considerable effort to locate and even more effort to say out loud.
“I keep running the math. If they’d gotten Claire, Kane would have had leverage over you, which means leverage over me, which means every decision I’ve made building this pack into a force strong enough to survive him would have been worth exactly nothing.
One sister. One quiet morning. That’s all it would have taken to unmake everything I’ve spent my life protecting. ”
“But they didn’t get her. You got there in time, and that matters more than the math you’re running right now.”
“This time.” His hands came up to frame her face, thumbs pressed light beneath her eyes, a gentleness at war with the fear still audible in his voice.
“I need you to understand how deep this runs for me, Emma. It’s not only love.
It’s terror, in equal measure, every single day, and I have gotten considerably better at hiding that from you than I ever meant to, better than I’m proud of. ”
“You don’t have to hide it from me. That’s the whole point of this.
” She pressed her palm against his chest, over his heart, feeling it hammering too fast for a man standing perfectly still.
“I love you. I need you to hear that plainly, without a mission attached to it, without adrenaline making it easier to say. I love you, and I’m terrified too, and I’m not going anywhere. ”
He turned in her arms, a rawness moving plainly behind his eyes, and pulled her in against his chest like he needed to feel her breathing to believe any of it was real.