Page 65 of Howl Lotta Love

Kane fired instead of answering.

Jace took the hit low on his shoulder, barely flinching, and closed the distance before Kane got off a second shot, disarming him with a single brutal motion and driving him into the wall hard enough to buckle a support strut. Kane’s wolf came up in desperation, claws raking a line across Jace’s forearm as he twisted free, and the two of them crashed through a filing partition in a jumble of fur and fury that scattered two decades of paperwork across the floor.

Kane fought with the desperation of someone who had nothing left to lose, and for a handful of seconds, that desperation almost bought him an opening—a glancing blow to Jace’s jaw that would have staggered a lesser opponent, and scrambled for the fallen gun that came within inches of his hand. Jace ended it before Kane’s fingers closed around the weapon, driving a knee into his ribs hard enough to fold him and finishing with a strike that put him flat on the floor, wolf and man both entirely spent.

Jace’s claws hovered at Kane’s throat, close enough to end this permanently, and for one long moment, the temptation sat plain and heavy in the air between them.

“Jace.” Emma’s voice, steady, certain. “He’s not worth what it costs you to do it. Let the law take him. That’s the version of justice that genuinely counts for anything.”

Jace held the position a beat longer, breathing hard, and then stepped back, shifting to human as he did, leaving Kane broken and disarmed on the floor for the law.

“Get him up,” Jace said to the nearest agent, voice flat. “He doesn’t get to bleed out on the floor and call it justice either.”

The tunnel access sat exactly where Emma’s overheard conversation promised, a service corridor sloping down and away from the compound, and the Chairman was a hundred yards ahead of them when Jace and Emma broke into the passage at a dead run.

Behind them, the compound’s battle had turned decisively—Roman’s voice crackled through the earpiece Jace hadn’t stopped to remove, breathless and triumphant. “Perimeter’s secure, mercenaries are down or running, and Diesel’s apparently adopted a guard dog off one of the loading docks.”

“Not now, Roman.”

“Copy. Focusing.” A beat, then, unable to help himself: “The dog’s name is Nugget. Diesel decided already. Continuing to focus now.”

“I’m sure he’s got the backup ledgers,” Emma called, adrenaline burning clean through every ache in her body. “If he gets those out of here, twenty years of solid evidence walks out with him.”

“Then we don’t let him get out.”

They ran the tunnel’s length side by side, emerging onto a narrow mountain trail as the sky finally started graying toward dawn, and caught sight of the Chairman crossing an old suspension bridge spanning a gorge deep enough that the bottom disappeared into shadow.

“Stop!” Jace’s shout echoed off the rock walls. “There’s nowhere left to run!”

The Chairman didn’t stop. Jace and Emma were right behind him, the two of them closing the gap across the swaying boards. The Chairman reached the midpoint with barely thirty feet between them, set a charge at the base of a support cable, calm and unhurried, a man who’d planned this exit for years, and kept walking.

“Get back,” Jace yelled.

The charge went off prematurely.

The explosion took the bridge’s near support in a shower of splintered wood and screaming cable, and the satchel the Chairman had been carrying—knocked loose in the blast—slid toward the widening gap in the bridge, original ledgers spilling free, years of evidence sliding directly toward the gorge.

Emma didn’t think. She lunged.

Her fingers closed around the satchel strap a half-second before the boards beneath her gave way fully, the whole section of bridge dropping out from under her feet, and the last thing she heard before the fall took her breath away completely was Jace screaming her name like it was the only word left in the world.

Jace Maddox

Jace’s hand closed around Emma’s wrist a half-second before she would have disappeared into the gorge for good, momentum nearly taking him over the edge with her, and every ounce of strength he owned went into the single act of not letting go.

His shoulder screamed where Kane’s bullet had caught it. He didn’t register the pain. He dug his other hand into the splintered edge of the bridge, braced his boots against a support beam that groaned under the strain, and hauled against a weight threatening to tear his arm from its socket before he’d let it tear Emma from his grip.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Emma, I’ve got you⁠—”

She hit the gorge wall on the way up, hard, a piece of broken cable opening a deep line along her side that soaked through her jacket in seconds, and the impact drove the air from her lungs so hard that, for one horrific moment, she didn’t make a sound at all.

He hauled her over the edge with a strength that came from somewhere past muscle, past training, past every tactical instinct he owned, and got her flat on solid ground with hands already moving over the wound at her side, pressing hard, trying to slow blood loss that was happening too fast for his liking.

“Emma. Emma, stay with me. Look at me.”

Her eyes fluttered, found his, and held on for exactly as long as her strength allowed.

“Got the ledgers,” she managed, voice barely a thread. “Didn’t lose them.”