19. Jace
NINETEEN
JACE
Dawn hadn’t broken yet when the compound’s perimeter lights went dark all at once, and the whole pack went still around him in the same instant, waiting on his word.
“Tucker, tell me you’ve got their communications.”
“Cut clean. They can’t call for backup, they can’t coordinate between wings, and they definitely can’t warn each other. I’m listening to everything they say on the internal channel.” Tucker’s voice carried a satisfaction he didn’t bother hiding. “You’re clear to move.”
Roman checked the charge on his sidearm one last time, none of his usual commentary anywhere in evidence. “For the record, boss, I’m not making a single joke until she’s out of that building. After that, all bets are off.”
“Good.” Jace didn’t look away from the compound, wolf clawing at the inside of his chest, every second of delay, a fresh violence he had to actively choose not to commit. “Diesel, you good?”
“I’m always good.” Diesel racked his weapon with the calm of a man about to do a task he considered perfectly reasonable. “Let’s go get our girl.”
“Roman, Diesel, you’re with me on the direct line to the archive wing.
Allied teams take the perimeter and clean up the rest.” Jace scanned the building one last time, memorizing every exit Emma had cataloged from inside, every guard rotation she’d fed them through a spreadsheet nobody else would have thought to check.
“Nobody touches her before I do. Nobody.”
Gerri’s allies materialized out of the tree line without a sound—shifters from three packs and one pride, called in on favors decades in the making, all of them here because Gerri Wilder had asked and nobody in this world said no to Gerri Wilder when it mattered.
Jace gave the signal.
The compound came apart at every entrance at the same second: alarms shrieking uselessly into a communications blackout nobody inside could fix.
Jace shifted mid-stride, clothes tearing away as bone and muscle rearranged into the shape built for exactly this.
He hit the first guard before the man’s weapon cleared its holster and didn’t slow down for the second, driving through the compound’s outer defense with a single-minded fury that had been building for eighteen hours and had finally, mercifully, found somewhere to go.
Roman and Diesel flanked him through the breach, human-form and brutal, clearing the hallway in a coordinated sweep they’d run a hundred times before but never with this much riding on the outcome.
A guard came around the corner with a rifle already rising; Diesel closed the distance and took him down with a single strike before the barrel finished its arc.
Two more converged from a side corridor, and Roman met them head-on, fast and vicious, buying Jace the two seconds he needed to put a fourth attacker through a support wall without breaking stride.
“Archive wing, second floor, east corridor.” Roman’s voice came tight through the comms, breathless. “We’re thirty seconds behind you, boss. Go.”
Jace went.
He tore through the compound’s interior, stopped being a man the moment the lights went out and hadn’t looked back since, claws and teeth and raw, focused fury clearing everybody that stood between him and the one thing that mattered.
A mercenary got a lucky shot into his flank; Jace didn’t pause long enough to feel it.
Another tried to block the stairwell with a riot shield; Jace went through it, momentum alone doing most of the job.
Emma had worked the hairpin out of her collar again and the door lock gave on the fourth try.
Before she left, she pulled Walter’s documents free from behind the loose grate and tucked them back inside her jacket.
She was out the door thirty seconds after the compound lost power, moving fast and low, dodging one confused guard by flattening into a supply closet and letting him run past toward chaos he didn’t understand yet, and headed for the detention block instead of the exit, because if this building was holding even one other prisoner the way it had held her, she wasn’t leaving without checking.
The locks were basic, the kind that gave to a determined hairpin and thirty seconds of patience.
She freed four captives in the detention wing—two shifters who’d crossed Kane at the wrong moment, an accountant who’d apparently made the same discovery Walter once had, and a young woman who cried with relief and asked no questions—and sent them running for the nearest exit while she pushed deeper into the building instead of out of it.
A guard rounded the corner ahead of her, disoriented by the alarms and the dark, and Emma didn’t slow down long enough to think about it—she drove her elbow into his throat the way Jace had drilled into her at the safe house, and he went down gasping while she kept moving without a backward glance.
Weeks ago, that kind of contact would have stopped her cold.
Tonight, it barely registered as anything beyond an obstacle cleared.
Following the sound of fighting toward the one place it made sense to converge, she guessed the records archive lay two corridors ahead, smoke already curling under its door, and somewhere past it, she could hear the unmistakable sound of a battle that had her name written all over its reason for happening.
Emma Burke
Jace found her in the archive doorway, smoke curling along the ceiling from a fire someone had started to cover their retreat, and the sight of him—massive, gold-eyed, blood-streaked, utterly hers—undid the knot in her chest that had been wound tight since the moment they’d taken her.
He shifted back the second he saw her, human again in one fluid collapse of muscle and bone, and crossed the distance between them in three strides to haul her against his chest so hard, the air left her lungs, one hand fisting in her hair, needing the physical proof of her pulse under his palm to genuinely believe it.
“You’re alive.” His voice came out wrecked. “You’re alive, you’re standing, you’re—”
“I’m here.” She pulled back only far enough to see his face. “I’m sure the Chairman’s running—there’s a tunnel access behind the records room, I heard two guards talking about it. He’s not going down with this building.”
“Then we don’t let him get far.” Fury and relief tangled in the same look on Jace’s face, and he kissed her once, hard and fast and utterly unwilling to let the moment pass no matter how little time they had. “Stay behind me until we’re clear of the fighting.”
“I’m not hiding behind anyone today.”
“I didn’t say hide.” He caught her hand, quick, hard, and pulled her into step beside him instead of behind. “I said stay close. There’s a difference, and today I don’t have it in me to argue about which one you’d rather have.”
Roman and Diesel caught up, both breathing hard from the run, Roman’s knuckles split open and Diesel with a graze along one temple.
“She’s good?” Roman’s eyes swept over Emma fast, cataloging every visible injury with real relief underneath the tactical read.
“She’s good. Great. Wonderful.” He exhaled, visibly shedding eighteen hours of silence in one breath.
“All bets are officially back on, by the way, exactly like I promised, so I want it known that I held out through an entire building breach without one joke, which is the single greatest act of restraint in the history of this company. Can we leave now, because I’ve personally punched four separate men today and I’d like that number to stay at four. ”
“We’re not done yet.” Jace’s voice had gone flat, lethal. “Kane’s still in the building somewhere. I want him.”
They fought their way out of the archive wing side by side, Jace’s fists and her sharp, precise instructions in equal measure—she called the blind corners, he cleared them, Roman and Diesel covering their flanks the whole way—and by the time they broke into the compound’s central corridor, the battle had turned decisively in the pack’s favor, mercenaries falling back in scattered retreat from warriors who knew this fight was already won.
Victor Kane stood in the middle of the chaos with a gun in one hand and the look of a man watching two decades of careful work burn down around him in real time.
“Maddox.” His voice had none of its usual charm left in it. “You’ve cost me everything.”
“You cost yourself everything. I only made sure you couldn’t hide from the bill.
” Jace stepped in front of Emma without seeming to think about it, every line of him gone lethal and still, a growl building low and constant in his chest. “Put the gun down, Victor. This ends one of two ways, and only one of them lets you walk out of here breathing.”
Kane fired instead of answering.
Jace took the hit low on his shoulder, barely flinching, and closed the distance before Kane got off a second shot, disarming him with a single brutal motion and driving him into the wall hard enough to buckle a support strut.
Kane’s wolf came up in desperation, claws raking a line across Jace’s forearm as he twisted free, and the two of them crashed through a filing partition in a jumble of fur and fury that scattered two decades of paperwork across the floor.
Kane fought with the desperation of someone who had nothing left to lose, and for a handful of seconds, that desperation almost bought him an opening—a glancing blow to Jace’s jaw that would have staggered a lesser opponent, and scrambled for the fallen gun that came within inches of his hand.
Jace ended it before Kane’s fingers closed around the weapon, driving a knee into his ribs hard enough to fold him and finishing with a strike that put him flat on the floor, wolf and man both entirely spent.
Jace’s claws hovered at Kane’s throat, close enough to end this permanently, and for one long moment, the temptation sat plain and heavy in the air between them.