Page 37 of Howl Lotta Love

The sound she made going down was small. Almost polite. Nothing close to what Emma expected a person dying to sound like.

“No—” Emma caught her before she hit the ground, knees cracking against concrete, both hands already pressing hard against the wound in a hopeless, automatic instinct to stop what couldn’t be stopped. Somewhere behind her, Jace’s voice tore loose in a sound closer to a roar than a word, and the crack of a single shot meant the fifth attacker wasn’t getting up again either.

“Drive.” Nina’s voice had gone thin, her hand finding Emma’s wrist with a grip that had nothing left in it but will. “Take it. It’s already yours—I needed you to have all of it.”

“Stay with me. Help’s coming, stay with me⁠—”

“Follow the property deeds.” Blood seeped at the corner of her mouth, her breathing gone wet and uneven. “Not the money. The money’s a distraction. He wants the land. Follow the deeds and you’ll find⁠—”

She didn’t finish. Emma held her through the last of it, some furious, useless part of her still trying to keep a promise the girl would never hear kept.

Jace found her there four minutes later, the warehouse gone quiet except for Roman zip-tying the last conscious attacker with far more force than the job required and Diesel’s low, steady voice on comms calling for backup that had arrived too late to matter for the one person it needed to save.

Emma sat on the cold concrete with Nina’s head in her lap and the drive clutched so tight in one fist, her knuckles had gone white, and when Jace crouched in front of her, gently prying her fingers open one at a time to check she hadn’t cut herself on her own grip, she let him.

“She saved my life,” Emma said, and her voice came out steadier than she expected, steadier than she had any right to feel. “She was twenty-six and terrified and she still stepped in front of a bullet for a stranger.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to waste that.” Emma finally looked up, dry-eyed in a way that registered as more dangerous than crying would have. “Every piece of what’s on this drive gets used. She doesn’t get to die for nothing.”

“She won’t.” Jace’s hand closed over hers, steady, grounding, and for once, he didn’t try to talk her out of the fury under the grief. “I’ve got you. Both things are true right now. Let’s use them.”

He helped her up, and for a moment, neither of them moved toward the door, the warehouse settling into the particular silence that only comes after violence has finished asking its questions.

“You ran the plan without hesitating,” he said, quiet, like it had been sitting in his chest since the moment she’d bolted left instead of freezing. “Two weeks ago you’d have frozen. Tonight, you ran a route we’d mapped and got her most of the way to safety. I need you to know what that meant to me. Trusting the plan. Trusting me enough to run it without checking twice.”

“I didn’t have time to check twice.”

“You had exactly enough time to check twice. You didn’t.” His thumb moved once over her knuckles, absent, needing the contact more than he needed to make the point. “That’s not nothing. Not to me.”

Emma looked at him for a long moment, the knot in her chest loosening even with Nina’s blood still drying on her hands. “For the first time in years, I didn’t feel alone. Not once. Even with everything going wrong, I knew exactly where you were and exactly what you’d do if I needed you.” Her voice wavered, the first real crack since the shooting started. “That terrifies me more than the mercenaries did.”

“Why?”

“Because it means I have something to lose now. A month ago the worst thing that could happen to me was losing a case. Now the worst thing that could happen to me is losing you, and that’s a different category of fear, and I don’t know what to do with it.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of one wrist, annoyed at herself for the tears finally showing up. “I don’t scare easily. I scare easily now.”

“Good.” He pulled her in, chin resting against her hair, arms banded around her tight enough that the fury still running underneath his calm came through anyway, a low current he hadn’t fully leashed yet. “Because I’ve been terrified of exactly that since the ballroom, and misery loves company.”

She laughed, wet and unexpected, into his shoulder. “That’s a terrible thing to say to someone who’s crying.”

“If anyone comes after you again,” Jace said, quieter, all the warmth gone out of his voice and replaced by a chill that ran far deeper, “there won’t be a corner of this city that hides them from me.”

“I believe you.”

“Good. Hold onto it.”

The basement command center hummed with the energy of a team that had a real lead and wasn’t about to waste it.

Tucker had the drive running through two separate decryption passes before Emma had finished washing the blood off her hands, and by the time she made it back to the lower level, he already had a file structure blooming open across several monitors.

Milo’s phone buzzed somewhere behind her, and his voice carried across the room before she could tune it out. “Nora wants to know if surviving gunfire with your fiancé counts as a second date. Her words, not mine. I’m relaying it because I told her I would, not because I have an opinion on the matter.”

“Tell her I’d rather not grade dates by body count.”

“I’ll paraphrase.” Milo’s thumbs kept going. “She’s going to be furious she missed this. She’s been asking to shadow a real op.”

“No,” Jace and Emma said, at nearly the same moment, and neither of them found that as funny as Roman clearly did.