Page 63 of Howl Lotta Love

Gerri’s face softened, all her usual sharp performance dropping away at once.

“It won’t go wrong.” She reached up and squeezed his shoulder, the gesture entirely without its usual theater. “Bring my girl home, Jace. That’s all I need from you. Everything else, we sort out side by side.”

Tucker’s shout cut through the command center forty minutes later, sharp enough to bring every head up at once.

“I’ve got her. I’ve got her, I found it—” He was pulling the file up on the main screen, hands shaking with raw adrenaline, having finally solved the only puzzle that mattered. “She’s a genius. Rough estimation of where she’s being held, guard rotation, the detention level location, all of it hidden in the notation. I almost missed it, except she alphabetizes everything the same way every single time, and I—” He stopped, visibly catching himself getting sentimental in front of the entire team, and cleared his throat hard. “I recognized her methodology. That’s all. Purely professional recognition.”

“Sure it was,” Roman said, not unkindly, already checking his own gear with the loose ease of long habit.

“It absolutely was.”

“You’ve had her spreadsheet formatting memorized since week two.” Diesel kept his attention on the rifle he was checking, matter-of-fact about it. “There’s no shame in it. We’ve all noticed things about her. I noticed she reorganizes silverware drawers wherever she stays longer than a day. Nobody’s judging anyone here, least of all me.”

“That’s totally different.”

“Is it, though.”

Jace was at the screen, memorizing coordinates with a focus that steadied his hands for the first time. “Get me everything. Building schematics, guard patterns, every exit she tracked. We move within the hour, not a minute later.”

The team assembled fast and silent, gear checked twice, weapons secured, the entire building humming with the taut energy of people who finally had a direction to point hours of fear toward. Jace pulled on his jacket with hands that had gone steady the moment purpose replaced helplessness, and looked at the assembled force with nothing left in his expression but resolve—the certainty of a man who intended to end this today and would not be talked into waiting for a better version of the plan.

“We go in fast, we go in quiet, and we don’t stop until she’s standing in front of me.” He met every set of eyes in the room, one at a time, making sure the order landed the way he needed it to. “Nobody comes home until she does.”

Gerri fell into step beside him on the way to the vehicles. “Go get our girl.”

“I intend to.” Jace met her eyes for one steady beat, everything he wasn’t saying passing between them anyway, gratitude and terror tangled up in the same look. “Thank you. For earlier.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me properly when she’s standing in that kitchen again, eating my croissants and pretending she doesn’t love them as much as she does.”

The convoy rolled out into the night, silent, disciplined, every vehicle running dark until they were close enough that stealth mattered more than speed.

A patrol vehicle crossed the access road two miles out, headlights sweeping wide, and the entire convoy went dark and still at once, engines cut, every warrior holding position without needing to be told. Jace’s pulse hammered through the longest ninety seconds of the entire drive, every instinct screaming to close the distance faster, until the patrol turned off toward the highway and the convoy exhaled as one unit and rolled forward again.

Jace’s hands didn’t shake once for the rest of the drive. There wasn’t room left in him for anything but getting to her.

Emma Burke

Emma heard them before she let herself believe it—a sound carrying faint through the compound’s concrete walls, distant but unmistakable, wolves howling somewhere past the tree line beyond the building’s edge.

She sat up straight in the dark, heart hammering, and listened harder, clocking the sound the same careful way she’d cataloged everything else in this building since the moment they’d brought her in.

Not one wolf. Many. Coordinated. Close.

Down the hall, she heard raised voices, the sudden scrape of a chair, a guard’s footsteps breaking into a run. The calm the compound had maintained since her arrival was gone totally, replaced by the chaos of people realizing, too late, exactly what was coming for them. Somewhere above her, an alarm began wailing, distant and frantic, far too late to matter.

Emma smiled for the first time since they’d taken her, slow and fierce and entirely unafraid.

Jace found me.

NINETEEN

JACE

Dawn hadn’t broken yet when the compound’s perimeter lights went dark all at once, and the whole pack went still around him in the same instant, waiting on his word.

“Tucker, tell me you’ve got their communications.”

“Cut clean. They can’t call for backup, they can’t coordinate between wings, and they definitely can’t warn each other. I’m listening to everything they say on the internal channel.” Tucker’s voice carried a satisfaction he didn’t bother hiding. “You’re clear to move.”