18. Emma #2
“Victor has a body count and a paper trail three inches thick, and you’re standing in the same building as both of those things right now.” She held his gaze without flinching. “That’s not patience, Chairman. That’s exposure. You haven’t noticed the difference yet.”
His expression shifted, fast and gone, and for the first time since she’d met him, Emma watched a flicker of genuine uncertainty cross a face built utterly around never showing any.
“You’re an interesting woman, Miss Burke.” He rose, smoothing his jacket with the same fastidious care as before, though his movements had gone half a beat slower than they’d been a few hours ago. “I do hope the people coming for you understand exactly what they’re walking into.”
“They do.” Emma smiled, slow and certain. “Better than you understand what’s walking toward you.”
He left without responding, and Emma allowed herself exactly one long breath before she went back to waiting, running the day’s conversations over in her head one more time.
Two visits. Two cracks in two very different kinds of armor.
If Jace’s team needed a way in past the compound’s defenses, the Chairman’s fraying partnership with Kane might prove much more useful than any door she could pick.
Jace Maddox
Maddox Command in the offices downtown hadn’t gone quiet in seven hours.
Jace hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t eaten anything Diesel put in front of him beyond two bites out of pure obligation.
He’d put his fist through a support beam in the stairwell somewhere around hour three, when the waiting got loud enough in his head that he’d needed a wall to break, and nobody on the team had said a word about the hole or the blood on his knuckles afterward.
He’d spent the rest of the stretch pacing between monitors, running scenarios, and fighting the particular brand of helplessness that came from loving someone whose location he didn’t know and couldn’t reach.
Tucker had tracked the van into downtown and as far as Kane’s building, but lost her trail after that.
Roman appeared at his elbow with a plate of food Jace hadn’t asked for and wasn’t planning to touch, setting it down with stubborn insistence—clearly sent by someone else, and clearly intent on seeing the mission through.
“Diesel says eat. I’m relaying the message.
I’m not personally invested in whether you comply, but he’ll sulk, and a sulking Diesel is worse for morale than a hungry alpha. ”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Noted. Eat anyway.” Roman didn’t move, arms crossed, an immovable wall in the doorway. “We’re going to get her back, boss. I need you at full strength when we do, not running on hours of spite and bad coffee.”
Jace ate three bites to make the point stop, which seemed to satisfy Roman enough that he wandered off toward Tucker’s station instead, muttering under his breath about betting pools that had gone very quiet since Emma’s disappearance, nobody quite willing to keep it running under the circumstances.
Gerri swept into the room like the small whirlwind she was and handed Tucker a flash drive.
“This just came in from Emma. Some pathetic little email about faking numbers for fame and fortune.” Her mouth curled, sharp with contempt for the very idea.
“That is not my girl. Whatever she’s actually telling us is buried in those numbers, and I want it found in the next ten minutes. ”
“Tucker—” Jace said.
“On it, boss. I’ll find it.”
Gerri turned to Jace, arms crossed, and only then did he notice she was dressed for combat, tactical boots and all, in a way that suggested she’d been planning this outfit for a while.
“I’m coming on this rescue, Jace. I want that understood clearly before you waste breath arguing with me.”
“Gerri—”
“That’s my girl in there. I didn’t spend six months matching the two of you to sit at home with a cup of tea while you go get her back.
” Her voice hadn’t risen. “As I’ve already said, I have resources this pack doesn’t have.
Contacts. Considerable leverage over people who owe me favors they’d rather not discuss publicly. My team is ready when you say go.”
Jace studied her for a long moment, fury and exhaustion both fighting for space behind his eyes, and her steady, unblinking patience finally cracked the composure he’d been maintaining through hours of controlled panic.
“I’m more afraid right now than I’ve ever been in my life.
” His voice came out low, rough, admitting a fact he hadn’t said out loud to anyone yet.
“Not the wars. Not anything before her. Nothing prepared me for this exact kind of fear, Gerri. She let herself be taken because she loves me enough to sacrifice herself for it, and I don’t know how to survive that if it goes wrong. ”
Gerri’s face softened, all her usual sharp performance dropping away at once.
“It won’t go wrong.” She reached up and squeezed his shoulder, the gesture entirely without its usual theater. “Bring my girl home, Jace. That’s all I need from you. Everything else, we sort out side by side.”
Tucker’s shout cut through the command center forty minutes later, sharp enough to bring every head up at once.
“I’ve got her. I’ve got her, I found it—” He was pulling the file up on the main screen, hands shaking with raw adrenaline, having finally solved the only puzzle that mattered.
“She’s a genius. Rough estimation of where she’s being held, guard rotation, the detention level location, all of it hidden in the notation.
I almost missed it, except she alphabetizes everything the same way every single time, and I—” He stopped, visibly catching himself getting sentimental in front of the entire team, and cleared his throat hard.
“I recognized her methodology. That’s all. Purely professional recognition.”
“Sure it was,” Roman said, not unkindly, already checking his own gear with the loose ease of long habit.
“It absolutely was.”
“You’ve had her spreadsheet formatting memorized since week two.
” Diesel kept his attention on the rifle he was checking, matter-of-fact about it.
“There’s no shame in it. We’ve all noticed things about her.
I noticed she reorganizes silverware drawers wherever she stays longer than a day.
Nobody’s judging anyone here, least of all me. ”
“That’s totally different.”
“Is it, though.”
Jace was at the screen, memorizing coordinates with a focus that steadied his hands for the first time. “Get me everything. Building schematics, guard patterns, every exit she tracked. We move within the hour, not a minute later.”
The team assembled fast and silent, gear checked twice, weapons secured, the entire building humming with the taut energy of people who finally had a direction to point hours of fear toward.
Jace pulled on his jacket with hands that had gone steady the moment purpose replaced helplessness, and looked at the assembled force with nothing left in his expression but resolve—the certainty of a man who intended to end this today and would not be talked into waiting for a better version of the plan.
“We go in fast, we go in quiet, and we don’t stop until she’s standing in front of me.” He met every set of eyes in the room, one at a time, making sure the order landed the way he needed it to. “Nobody comes home until she does.”
Gerri fell into step beside him on the way to the vehicles. “Go get our girl.”
“I intend to.” Jace met her eyes for one steady beat, everything he wasn’t saying passing between them anyway, gratitude and terror tangled up in the same look. “Thank you. For earlier.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me properly when she’s standing in that kitchen again, eating my croissants and pretending she doesn’t love them as much as she does.”
The convoy rolled out into the night, silent, disciplined, every vehicle running dark until they were close enough that stealth mattered more than speed.
A patrol vehicle crossed the access road two miles out, headlights sweeping wide, and the entire convoy went dark and still at once, engines cut, every warrior holding position without needing to be told.
Jace’s pulse hammered through the longest ninety seconds of the entire drive, every instinct screaming to close the distance faster, until the patrol turned off toward the highway and the convoy exhaled as one unit and rolled forward again.
Jace’s hands didn’t shake once for the rest of the drive. There wasn’t room left in him for anything but getting to her.
Emma Burke
Emma heard them before she let herself believe it—a sound carrying faint through the compound’s concrete walls, distant but unmistakable, wolves howling somewhere past the tree line beyond the building’s edge.
She sat up straight in the dark, heart hammering, and listened harder, clocking the sound the same careful way she’d cataloged everything else in this building since the moment they’d brought her in.
Not one wolf. Many. Coordinated. Close.
Down the hall, she heard raised voices, the sudden scrape of a chair, a guard’s footsteps breaking into a run.
The calm the compound had maintained since her arrival was gone totally, replaced by the chaos of people realizing, too late, exactly what was coming for them.
Somewhere above her, an alarm began wailing, distant and frantic, far too late to matter.
Emma smiled for the first time since they’d taken her, slow and fierce and entirely unafraid.
Jace found me.