Page 17 of Howl Lotta Love

“Forensic accounting’s loss,” Milo said, dead serious, and packed up his kit.

Roman trailed in a few minutes later, jacket torn at the shoulder, looking far more pleased with the evening. He dropped onto the arm of the couch, took in her bandaged wrist and doctored cheek with a critic’s eye. “You held that tire iron like you meant it. Impressed.”

“I did mean it.”

“I know. That’s why I’m impressed.” He glanced at Jace, grin dropping into a flat, serious line for exactly as long as it took him to say, “She’s tougher than the last three protection details combined, boss,” before it snapped back into place. “Also, for the record, I had a date tonight. A good one. Kidnappers ruin everything.”

“Your date can wait.”

“My date is now my third date, because I texted an apology from the van, and she said, quote, ‘as long as nobody died,’ which”—he glanced toward the body bags loading into an unmarked vehicle outside—“is a conversation I am not having with her tonight.”

Diesel appeared in the doorway and set a mug of tea in front of Emma without a word. She took it, startled, and he vanished again, muttering to himself about a stray cat he’d spotted near the van.

Jace left her to the team and went to stand in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed.

This stopped being a job days ago. I stopped pretending otherwise around the time I stopped being able to.

Tucker found him there twenty minutes later, laptop under one arm, expression carefully blank in the way that meant bad news underneath it.

“Pulled the dash cam and a phone off the van.” Tucker set the laptop on the counter, turned the screen. “You’re going to want to see this before she does.”

Jace crossed the kitchen in three strides. The photo filled the screen—Emma, mid-stride, coat collar up, auburn hair loose from its pins, timestamped days before Jace had ever caught a stack of folders outside a ballroom.

“Recognize the building?”

“Of course, I recognize it.” He stared at the timestamp until the numbers stopped being numbers and started being a threat instead. “That’s the night before Gerri ever called me in. Before I even knew her name.”

“Which means whoever’s running this wasn’t watching her because of you.” Tucker’s voice had gone careful. “They were watching her before you existed to them at all. You didn’t paint the target on her back, boss. You only noticed it was already there, which is a very different thing to carry around.”

That was supposed to make him feel better.

It didn’t. Not even remotely close.

“Someone had eyes on her before you did.”

SIX

EMMA

Emma woke up furious, which was becoming a bit of a pattern.

Her wrist ached under its brace. The cut on her cheekbone pulled every time she frowned, and she was frowning a lot this morning, mostly at the ceiling. She’d slept in a strange bed in a stranger’s fortress surrounded by armed men who’d apparently adopted her overnight, and the first sound she heard on waking was a chair scraping outside her door.

She yanked it open, ready for round two of last night’s argument, and found her own door had been custom-decorated.

FUTURE ALPHA SUITE. Block capitals. Permanent marker. Dead center.

“Diesel.”

Diesel—apparently her hallway’s assigned guard—looked up from his coffee with an expression of total, wounded innocence. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“You’re sitting six inches from it.”

“Coincidence.”

She left it for later interrogation and stalked off toward the kitchen instead, because a man had posted armed muscle outside her bedroom without asking, and she had opinions ranked by severity and ready to deploy.

Jace was there, dressed, alert, every line of him wide awake and daring anyone to suggest otherwise. His eyes went to her cheek first, then her wrist, something flickering behind them before he shut it down.