Page 49 of Howl Lotta Love

They crossed the gravel lot, side by side, the church’s broken doorway a black mouth ahead of them, and a shape staggered out of the shadows before they’d covered half the distance—a man Jace recognized from Emma’s case files, older than his photographs, hollowed out in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with two decades of choices finally catching up with him at once.

Walter Pierce was bleeding from a wound low on his side, one hand pressed hard against it, the other clutching a sealed envelope like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

“Emma.” His voice came out thin, wrecked. “You came.”

“Walter, what happened to you⁠—”

“They were behind me. I didn’t lose them, I only slowed them down.” He pressed the envelope into her hands with a grip that had nothing left in it but urgency. “Everything’s in there. Every acquisition, every shell company, every name. But there’s one fact you need before you do anything else, because you’re about to make a mistake that gets you killed.” His breath caught, wet and uneven. “Kane isn’t the one you should fear⁠—”

Headlights swept across the lot.

Emma Burke

Four vehicles converged on the church at once, doors opening before they’d fully stopped, and the first shots cracked off the gravel a half-second later.

“Down!” Jace’s voice tore through the gravel and the gunfire, and he’d put himself between Emma and the nearest line of fire before the word finished leaving him—and then the sound that came out of his chest stopped being anything close to human.

Emma had seen him fight before—the parking garage, the warehouse, hands and speed and controlled violence. She had never seen this.

His body broke apart and remade itself in the space of one breath, clothes tearing, bones rearranging with a sound that registered in her ribs more than her ears, and where a man had stood a half-second earlier there was now a creature massive and dark and utterly lethal, amber eyes gone molten gold in the dark, every ounce of the leashed power she’d always sensed under his skin finally, absolutely unleashed. He hit the first attacker before the man’s gun finished rising, and the fight that followed had nothing careful left in it at all.

Claws opened a line across a mercenary’s forearm and sent his weapon skittering into the dark. A second man got off one wild shot before eight hundred pounds of muscle and fury drove him into the church’s crumbling stone wall hard enough to bring down a section of it. A third came at Jace’s flank with a knife, and Jace caught the man’s wrist in his jaws and threw him bodily into the fourth attacker behind him, both men going down in a tangle of limbs that didn’t get back up. He moved low and fast between cover, closing distances, and every attacker who got within reach went down and stayed down.

“Emma, move!” Roman’s voice cut through the chaos, already firing controlled bursts from the tree line. “Get Walter behind the wall, now!”

She grabbed Walter’s arm and hauled him toward the crumbling remains of the church’s foundation, his weight dragging heavy and wrong against her shoulder, blood soaking warm through her sleeve. Rounds sparked off stone inches from her head. Another mercenary rounded the corner of the foundation almost on top of her, and Emma swung the only weapon she had—a chunk of broken masonry—hard into the side of his knee. He went down screaming, and Roman finished the job from twenty feet out without breaking stride. She didn’t stop moving until she and Walter were both behind the wall, chest heaving, his breathing gone shallow and fast beside her.

Jace moved through the mercenaries like an idea nobody had properly planned for. Emma caught glimpses between breaths—a man thrown clear across the lot, another put down before he’d finished raising his weapon, Diesel and Roman converging from the flanks to close every gap Jace’s fury left open. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t meant to be. It was four decades of pack instinct given full permission for the first time tonight, and by every reasonable measure it was supposed to terrify her.

It didn’t. It made her chest ache with something that wasn’t fear at all.

A mercenary broke from the tree line and sprinted straight for the wall where Emma crouched with Walter, weapon rising, and Jace closed the gap between them before the man could get off a single round, one massive paw driving him face-first into the dirt with enough force to end the argument permanently. Gold eyes found Emma’s for one suspended second—checking, cataloging, making sure she was whole—before he turned back into the fight without a sound.

Her phone buzzed against her hip in the middle of it, absurd and insistent. She answered without thinking, adrenaline overriding judgment.

“Darling, is everyone alive?” Gerri’s voice, bright and entirely unbothered by the gunfire audible through the phone. “I only ask because I need Jace at the Hendricks luncheon Thursday and dead men make terrible dinner company.”

“We’re a little busy, Gerri⁠—”

“I understand completely. Tell him not to bleed on the navy suit; it’s dry clean only.” The line went dead before Emma could respond, and she found herself laughing, wet and disbelieving, in the middle of a firefight.

Walter’s hand found her wrist in a lull between exchanges, grip weak but insistent.

“Chairman,” he managed. “Kane doesn’t run this. He’s never run this. There’s a man above him—decades ahead of him—the Chairman built the whole acquisition strategy long before Kane was ever recruited. Kane’s only the face. The Chairman’s the architect.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name. Nobody does. He’s never been in a room that could connect back to him.” Walter’s breathing had gone thin, wet at the edges. “The map. Inside the envelope. Every property he already controls, and the last piece he needs to close the ring. You have to see it before⁠—”

“Walter.” Emma pressed both hands hard against the wound in his side, some useless part of her still trying to buy him time she knew he didn’t have. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner? Years ago. Before any of this.”

“Because I was ashamed, and shame’s a coward’s excuse for staying quiet.” His eyes found hers, clear for one last moment despite everything. “You were always the better accountant, Emma. I used to tell myself that was jealousy talking. It wasn’t. You never once let yourself become convenient to people who didn’t deserve you. I did. I let it happen slowly enough that I stopped noticing the difference.”

“That doesn’t undo it.”

“No. But it’s true anyway, and I wanted you to hear it from me instead of reading it in a file.” His grip weakened further. “You were the best student I ever had. I’m sorry it took me twenty years and a bullet to prove it mattered to me.”

His hand went slack in hers before the sentence found its end, and the fight left his face all at once, the way it does, final and complete and nothing like the movies made it look.