Page 46 of Howl Lotta Love

Down the hall, through the gap in the door, he caught one glimpse of Emma’s shadow moving along the far wall of the conference suite where she’d slipped in behind the caterers, phone raised, capturing document after document fast and silent, seventeen years of preparation compressed into ninety seconds. Kane’s threat had reached her too—Tucker’s live feed ran to both their earpieces—and if her hands shook at all hearing it, they didn’t slow down.

Emma’s voice crackled in low over the comms, barely a whisper. “Got the acquisition list. Getting the co-conspirator names now.”

“Copy. Move fast.”

“Almost there. Two more pages.”

Footsteps sounded from the far stairwell, slow and even, headed their direction.

The board meeting broke early, chairs scraping back inside the conference room, and Jace had to decide how badly this was about to go. A woman in a sharp gray suit stepped into the hallway and stopped dead at the sight of him.

“I know you.” Her eyes narrowed, recognition sharpening fast. “The engagement announcement. Maddox Tactical. You were at the Kane Foundation gala.”

“Wrong floor, I’m afraid.” Jace kept his voice easy, already calculating exits without letting it show. “We’re at the benefit luncheon downstairs. Got turned around looking for the restroom.”

“This floor requires clearance.” Her hand moved toward the radio at her hip. “I need you to come with me.”

Emma slipped out of the conference suite at exactly the wrong moment, papers photographed and phone already pocketed, and the woman’s gaze snapped to her with the fury of someone who’d watched a very expensive secret walk out the door in real time.

“Security to the fourteenth floor, now⁠—”

Jace didn’t let her finish the sentence. He crossed the distance in two strides, closed a hand over the radio before she could key it, and put her against the wall with enough controlled force to end the argument without breaking anything vital.

“Run,” he said to Emma, already turning to meet the first guard rounding the corner. “Parking level, now. Our car’s on sublevel two.”

She didn’t argue. She didn’t freeze. She ran.

Jace bought her the thirty seconds she needed with his fists, and it cost him a lot more effort than thirty seconds usually did.

The first guard came in swinging a collapsible baton with real training behind it, and Jace caught the strike on his forearm hard enough to bruise, twisted the weapon free, and drove his elbow into the man’s throat with a crack that put him down gasping and he didn’t get back up. The second and third closed in flanking him, and for one stretched-out second, Jace let the wolf up enough to feel his knuckles sharpen, sound dropping away until all that was left was breath and pulse and the too-sharp clarity his body only found in real danger, every civilized instinct in him narrowing down to the single, animal calculation of clear the hallway, get to her, nothing else matters.

He put the second man through a decorative glass partition with a single open-handed strike that cost the building much more in repairs than it cost Jace in effort, and caught the third one’s fist an inch from his own jaw, twisting the arm until the joint gave and the man screamed and dropped. A fourth guard rounded the corner with a gun already rising, and Jace closed the distance before the man’s finger found the trigger, slamming him back into the wall hard enough to buckle the drywall, disarming him in the same motion he used to put him on the floor.

Alarms started screaming through the tower above him, red light strobing down every hallway at once.

He hit the stairwell three steps behind Emma’s fading footsteps, taking the flights two at a time, blood on his knuckles and satisfaction he wasn’t proud of settling low in his chest, because nobody put hands anywhere near what belonged to him and walked away feeling good about the decision.

“Parking level, sublevel two,” Roman’s voice barked through the earpiece. “We’re rolling, thirty seconds out.”

They burst through the stairwell door into a garage exactly as gray and airless as every other billionaire’s garage Jace had ever cleared, low ceilings and bad lighting and a security team already fanning out toward the exits with weapons drawn.

A round sparked off the concrete pillar six inches from Jace’s head. He returned fire without breaking stride, dropping the shooter with a single controlled shot, and hauled Emma behind a parked sedan as two more guards converged from the far ramp, bullets chewing concrete inches from where her head had been a half-second earlier.

“Keys.” Emma’s hand was already out.

“You’re driving?”

“You’re better at shooting. I’m better at not hitting parked cars while doing it. Keys, Jace, now.”

He threw them without a second’s hesitation, which surprised him almost as much as it surprised her, and she caught them out of the air and sprinted for the driver’s seat while he covered their backs, firing controlled bursts that put two more of Kane’s security team down without slowing their retreat.

The engine roared to life. Emma had them moving before Jace’s door fully closed, tires screaming against concrete, and he twisted in his seat to return fire through the open window as a black SUV peeled out of a side ramp to give chase.

“Left at the next pillar,” he called, reloading with the ease of long practice. “Roman, we need that exit gate open in the next ten seconds or we’re testing whether this car can drive through steel.”

“Gate’s opening, gate’s opening—drive, Emma, drive!”

She took the turn tight enough that Jace’s shoulder hit the door, corrected without flinching, and threaded the needle between a support column and an oncoming service cart with a precision that belonged to a woman who’d apparently been holding out on him about her driving skills for weeks. The SUV clipped the same column trying to follow, metal shrieking against concrete, and fell back half a length.