19. Jace #2
“Jace.” Emma’s voice, steady, certain. “He’s not worth what it costs you to do it. Let the law take him. That’s the version of justice that genuinely counts for anything.”
Jace held the position a beat longer, breathing hard, and then stepped back, shifting to human as he did, leaving Kane broken and disarmed on the floor for the law.
“Get him up,” Jace said to the nearest agent, voice flat. “He doesn’t get to bleed out on the floor and call it justice either.”
The tunnel access sat exactly where Emma’s overheard conversation promised, a service corridor sloping down and away from the compound, and the Chairman was a hundred yards ahead of them when Jace and Emma broke into the passage at a dead run.
Behind them, the compound’s battle had turned decisively—Roman’s voice crackled through the earpiece Jace hadn’t stopped to remove, breathless and triumphant. “Perimeter’s secure, mercenaries are down or running, and Diesel’s apparently adopted a guard dog off one of the loading docks.”
“Not now, Roman.”
“Copy. Focusing.” A beat, then, unable to help himself: “The dog’s name is Nugget. Diesel decided already. Continuing to focus now.”
“I’m sure he’s got the backup ledgers,” Emma called, adrenaline burning clean through every ache in her body. “If he gets those out of here, twenty years of solid evidence walks out with him.”
“Then we don’t let him get out.”
They ran the tunnel’s length side by side, emerging onto a narrow mountain trail as the sky finally started graying toward dawn, and caught sight of the Chairman crossing an old suspension bridge spanning a gorge deep enough that the bottom disappeared into shadow.
“Stop!” Jace’s shout echoed off the rock walls. “There’s nowhere left to run!”
The Chairman didn’t stop. Jace and Emma were right behind him, the two of them closing the gap across the swaying boards.
The Chairman reached the midpoint with barely thirty feet between them, set a charge at the base of a support cable, calm and unhurried, a man who’d planned this exit for years, and kept walking.
“Get back,” Jace yelled.
The charge went off prematurely.
The explosion took the bridge’s near support in a shower of splintered wood and screaming cable, and the satchel the Chairman had been carrying—knocked loose in the blast—slid toward the widening gap in the bridge, original ledgers spilling free, years of evidence sliding directly toward the gorge.
Emma didn’t think. She lunged.
Her fingers closed around the satchel strap a half-second before the boards beneath her gave way fully, the whole section of bridge dropping out from under her feet, and the last thing she heard before the fall took her breath away completely was Jace screaming her name like it was the only word left in the world.
Jace Maddox
Jace’s hand closed around Emma’s wrist a half-second before she would have disappeared into the gorge for good, momentum nearly taking him over the edge with her, and every ounce of strength he owned went into the single act of not letting go.
His shoulder screamed where Kane’s bullet had caught it.
He didn’t register the pain. He dug his other hand into the splintered edge of the bridge, braced his boots against a support beam that groaned under the strain, and hauled against a weight threatening to tear his arm from its socket before he’d let it tear Emma from his grip.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Emma, I’ve got you—”
She hit the gorge wall on the way up, hard, a piece of broken cable opening a deep line along her side that soaked through her jacket in seconds, and the impact drove the air from her lungs so hard that, for one horrific moment, she didn’t make a sound at all.
He hauled her over the edge with a strength that came from somewhere past muscle, past training, past every tactical instinct he owned, and got her flat on solid ground with hands already moving over the wound at her side, pressing hard, trying to slow blood loss that was happening too fast for his liking.
“Emma. Emma, stay with me. Look at me.”
Her eyes fluttered, found his, and held on for exactly as long as her strength allowed.
“Got the ledgers,” she managed, voice barely a thread. “Didn’t lose them.”
“I don’t care about the ledgers.” His voice cracked entirely. “I don’t care about any of it. Stay awake. Stay with me.”
Down the trail, Gerri appeared at the far end of the ruined bridge with a speed that defied every law of physics anyone present understood, blocking the Chairman’s only remaining path off the mountain with nothing but her own small, immovable presence and an expression that dared him to try getting past her.
Nobody asked how she’d gotten there. Nobody was going to get a straight answer if they did.
Federal agents closed the last of the distance within minutes, the Chairman’s twenty years of careful invisibility ending in handcuffs on a mountain trail at dawn.
None of it registered for Jace. Emma was fading in his arms, blood loss and shock pulling her under faster than he could think, and for the first time in the entire war he’d been fighting, he had absolutely no plan left.
No tactic. No strategy. Only a woman he loved bleeding out on a mountain trail and a storm building fast and dark on the horizon.
“Milo!” The shout tore out of him raw. “MILO, NOW!”
Milo reached them at a dead run, kit open, and got a compress against Emma’s side with hands that had done this a hundred times but never once for someone this important to the man holding her.
“Deep laceration, significant blood loss. She needs a hospital, and she needs it faster than this storm is going to allow.” Milo’s voice stayed clinical even as his own hands moved fast enough to betray the urgency underneath.
“The ranger cabin’s closer than anywhere else.
I can stabilize her there until the weather breaks. ”
“Then that’s where we’re headed. Now.”
Jace gathered Emma against his chest, careful of the wound, and carried her up the trail toward the cabin through a storm that had finally, fully broken loose overhead, rain and wind screaming past them both while he held her like she was the only solid thing left in the world.
“Stay with me,” he said, low, urgent, mouth close to her ear as he walked. “I need you to stay with me, because I have things left to say and I am not saying them to somebody who isn’t listening.”
Her eyes cracked open, glassy but present.
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve loved you since the ballroom, and there was no talking myself out of it by the time those elevator doors opened on the worst-timed, best thing that ever happened to me.
I have loved you every single day since with a certainty that terrified me before I let myself accept it.
” His voice came out rough, unguarded, every wall he’d built over a lifetime of self-sufficiency finally, completely down.
“You are the reason I understand what my father meant when he said a real alpha isn’t the one who needs nobody.
You are the reason I know exactly what I’m protecting when I say I’ll protect this pack with my life.
It was never only the pack, Emma. It was always going to be you, from the second I caught you at that gala and forgot how words worked for four straight seconds. ”
“That’s…” Her voice wavered, thin but steady underneath it. “That’s the most you’ve ever said to me at once.”
“I’ve been holding all of it back. I’m done with that.
” Behind them, Roman and Diesel had already peeled off toward the tree line to hold a perimeter against the storm and anything else still out there; this part, they’d silently agreed, belonged to Jace alone.
He kicked the cabin door open and carried her inside out of the worst of the storm, laying her down as gently as his shaking hands allowed.
“I need you to fight. I need you to stay, because I don’t know how to be the man I’ve become without you standing next to me while I do it. ”
Emma’s hand found his, weak but certain, fingers curling around his with everything she had left.
“I’ve known for weeks.” Her eyes held his, steady despite everything her body was fighting through.
“I’ve known since the safe house, maybe before.
I used to think loving someone meant becoming smaller, quieter, less myself, because that’s what the last one taught me.
You never once asked me to be smaller. You only kept showing up, over and over, choosing every version of me I brought into a room.
My heart already made its choice a long time ago, Jace Maddox, and I am not done yet. Not even close.”
He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing her in like it might be the last time he got the chance, and held on with everything he had while the storm closed in around the cabin and Milo worked fast and steady to keep the woman he loved from slipping any further away.
No matter what happened next, Jace had never been more certain of anything in his life: he wasn’t leaving her side again.