Page 36 of Howl Lotta Love

Milo appeared in the doorway, phone already out, thumbs moving with the focus of a man mid-conversation. “Nora wants to know if you’re doing okay. I told her I’d ask, but between us, I think she mostly wants me to describe your face right now for content purposes.”

“Tell her I’m fine.”

“She won’t believe that. Neither do I, honestly, but I’ll pass it along.” Milo’s thumbs kept moving, undeterred by the lack of enthusiasm in the room.

Jace’s jaw ticked once, watching the whole table circle her like she was made of glass instead of a woman who’d once made a federal auditor cry using nothing but a spreadsheet. He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t have to. He reached over and refilled her coffee without being asked, which from him counted as a small act of open warfare against anyone who thought she needed managing.

Emma caught his eye across the table, and a current passed between them, steadier than the case, older than last night, finally given room to breathe now that neither of them was pretending otherwise.

“We move in an hour,” Jace said, standing, and the kitchen shifted gears around him the way it always did. He stopped behind her chair long enough to squeeze her shoulder on his way to grab his jacket, an absent, easy touch that had nothing tactical in it at all, and she caught herself leaning into it before she’d decided to.

The warehouse sat exactly where Tucker’s pin had promised, a converted storage facility gone quiet with disuse, bare concrete floors and ceilings high enough to swallow sound in ways that would make any ambush a lot harder to hear coming.

“Perimeter’s clean,” Roman’s voice crackled through the earpiece, low. “No vehicles, no lookouts, no sign of anyone but your girl. Doesn’t mean I like it.”

Jace’s hand found her hip as they crossed the loading dock, steering her wide of a stack of pallets that could’ve hidden anyone, his whole body angled between her and every blind corner without seeming to think about it. “Stay behind me until we’ve got eyes on this person.”

“I always stay behind you. I’m a model client.”

“You have never once stayed behind me.”

“I stayed behind you for a solid four seconds in the parking garage. It’s a start.”

Their contact was already waiting when Emma and Jace stepped through the side door—a woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty-six, hunched into an oversized coat, hands wrapped so tight around a laptop bag that her knuckles had gone pale.

“You’re Emma Burke.” A statement, not a request for confirmation. The woman’s eyes flicked to Jace, cataloging him fast, the reflexive scan of someone who’d learned to check exits before she learned to trust rooms. “My name’s Nina. I work—worked—two floors under Kane Strategic Holdings’ compliance office. I found something I wasn’t supposed to find.”

“Take your time,” Emma said, gentler than she meant to, because the girl’s hands hadn’t stopped shaking since they’d walked in.

“There isn’t time. That’s the whole problem.” Nina unzipped the bag with fingers that fumbled twice before finding the drive inside. “Kane’s not laundering charity money for profit. He’s laundering it to buy land. I found the shell registrations six weeks ago. I’ve been sitting on this because every time I think about going to the police, I remember his security detail moves like it’s ex-military, and I get a lot less brave.”

“You came to us instead.”

“I came to you because you’re the only person who’s gotten close enough to scare him. That’s not nothing.” Nina’s laugh came out thin, more nerves than humor. “I used to read about you. The corporate fraud thing, months back. My roommate thought it was cool. I thought you were terrifying, in a good way. The kind of terrifying that catches people who deserve it.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one.” Nina held the drive out, hand still shaking. “This has everything. Every shell company, every property acquisition, every⁠—”

The side door blew inward.

Four men in tactical gear came through the breach fast and coordinated, and Emma’s whole body went cold with recognition before her brain finished registering what she was looking at—the same disciplined, wordless efficiency from the parking garage, the same total absence of hesitation that meant these weren’t opportunists.

“Down!” Jace’s voice cut through the warehouse’s cavernous acoustics, already moving, already between Emma and the nearest line of fire before she’d finished registering the order, a raw, animal sound tearing loose from somewhere underneath a decade of training.

She grabbed Nina by the coat sleeve and hauled her behind a support column as the first shots cracked off the concrete, sound bouncing wrong in the open space, impossible to tell which direction anything came from. Dust kicked up where a round chewed into the pillar six inches from her head. Somewhere behind them, Diesel’s low voice counted targets over comms, calm and even, a man doing math in the middle of chaos because someone had to.

Roman’s voice crackled through Jace’s earpiece, tight and fast, already converging on the building from the perimeter. “Two more coming through the loading dock. We’re closing the gap, boss, thirty seconds.”

“Don’t have thirty seconds.” Every ounce of Jace had narrowed down to a single objective, all warmth gone out of him at once, and the look on his face when he put the second attacker down wasn’t tactical anymore—it was personal. “Go left,” he said to her, low, urgent, meeting her eyes for half a second that carried an entire conversation’s worth of trust in it. “Service exit, two hundred feet, the one we mapped this morning. I’ll cover you.”

She didn’t argue. She didn’t freeze. She grabbed Nina’s arm and ran the route they’d walked through on Tucker’s floor plan at six that morning, mapped for exactly this contingency, and some small, distant part of her recognized that the woman she’d been a month ago would have frozen solid at the first gunshot instead of moving like she’d rehearsed this a hundred times.

Behind her, Jace was laying down cover fire in short, controlled bursts, human-form and tactical, no wolf in it yet, only a man who’d done this before and intended to keep doing it until everyone on his side was breathing. A round sparked off a metal support two feet from Emma’s shoulder. She didn’t slow down. Slowing got people killed, and she had a twenty-six-year-old’s entire future clutched in her free hand.

They almost made it.

The fifth attacker came from an angle nobody had mapped, materializing out of a stack of shipping crates with a gun already leveled, and Nina—half a step behind Emma, close enough to see it coming—shoved Emma sideways with both hands and took the shot meant for Emma’s back.