Page 59 of Howl Lotta Love

“There isn’t another way. I’ve looked.”

“Then we keep looking.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, gentler than his voice had been a second ago. “I need you to promise me you’ll drop this.”

She didn’t answer right away, and the silence itself must have worried him, because his grip on her tightened.

“Emma.”

“I hear you.” It wasn’t a promise, and she was careful to make sure it didn’t sound like one either, though she suspected he heard the difference and simply chose, in that moment, to let it go rather than fight her on it twice in one night.

Emma found him alone in the basement hours later, the whole house finally quiet, Claire asleep in a guest room under Milo’s watch and the rest of the team scattered to their own version of decompressing.

He stood at the window with his back to her, shoulders still carrying the tension from their argument, and she crossed the room and pressed her forehead flat between his shoulder blades without a word, letting the silence do what an apology couldn’t yet.

“I keep thinking about how close that was.” His voice came out low, rough.

“I know.” She pressed her cheek between his shoulder blades, feeling the muscle there still coiled tight under her palms. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going through your head right now, not the tactical summary, not the version you give the team.”

He turned to face her, jaw working, and for a long moment, said nothing, the words needing considerable effort to locate and even more effort to say out loud. “I keep running the math. If they’d gotten Claire, Kane would have had leverage over you, which means leverage over me, which means every decision I’ve made building this pack into a force strong enough to survive him would have been worth exactly nothing. One sister. One quiet morning. That’s all it would have taken to unmake everything I’ve spent my life protecting.”

“But they didn’t get her. You got there in time, and that matters more than the math you’re running right now.”

“This time.” His hands came up to frame her face, thumbs pressed light beneath her eyes, a gentleness at war with the fear still audible in his voice. “I need you to understand how deep this runs for me, Emma. It’s not only love. It’s terror, in equal measure, every single day, and I have gotten considerably better at hiding that from you than I ever meant to, better than I’m proud of.”

“You don’t have to hide it from me. That’s the whole point of this.” She pressed her palm against his chest, over his heart, feeling it hammering too fast for a man standing perfectly still. “I love you. I need you to hear that plainly, without a mission attached to it, without adrenaline making it easier to say. I love you, and I’m terrified too, and I’m not going anywhere.”

He turned in her arms, a rawness moving plainly behind his eyes, and pulled her in against his chest like he needed to feel her breathing to believe any of it was real.

“I meant it at the lodge. Every word.” His voice had gone quiet, unguarded in a way she rarely got from him even now. “But there’s a piece of that first night I never told you. I did more than catch you in that ballroom. I smelled you three full seconds before you turned the corner, and every instinct I owned went still and then loud all at once, and I spent the rest of that gala trying to convince myself it was coincidence. It wasn’t coincidence. My wolf knew exactly what you were to me before I’d said a single word to you. It’s only gotten more certain since. Tonight most of all.”

“That’s noticeably more romantic than anything you’ve admitted before.”

“I’m choosing my moments better lately.” He tipped her chin up, kissed her slow and thorough, one hand sliding into her hair while the other banded firm around her waist, and rested his forehead against hers when they broke apart. “Promise me one thing. No matter what comes next, you trust me. You don’t go anywhere alone. You let me protect you, even when it costs you some control you’d rather keep.”

“I promise.” The lie sat easy on her tongue, because it wasn’t quite a lie—she trusted him without reservation. She simply also trusted herself, and after tonight’s argument she understood a fact she hadn’t fully accepted before: he would never, not in a hundred years, agree to what she was about to do, no matter how she framed it, no matter how carefully she argued the tactical merits. Loving him meant he would try to take the danger for himself instead, every single time, and she couldn’t let that happen either. The only way through this protected everyone she loved, and it required doing the one thing she’d only now promised not to do.

He kissed her again, unaware of the calculation running underneath her words, unhurried and thorough enough that for several long minutes she almost let herself forget the plan entirely. Almost.

She didn’t. She held onto him a little longer, memorizing the feel of his arms around her, and let herself have this fully before the harder part of the night began.

She waited until he finally slept, exhaustion catching up with him somewhere past three in the morning, and lay awake beside him for a long while first, memorizing the sound of his breathing, his arm thrown heavy across her waist even in sleep, like some animal part of him refused to stop guarding her even unconscious.

I’m sorry. She didn’t let herself finish the thought any further than that, because finishing it meant admitting how badly this could go.

She slipped out of bed with the same careful precision she used for reading a fraudulent ledger, dressing in the dark, moving around a decade of tactical training she’d absorbed without meaning to over these past weeks.

The silver bracelet caught the low light on the nightstand, panic trigger coiled inside its clasp, and she made herself set it down instead of fastening it on. Two taps and the whole team would know her exact location inside four seconds—which meant Kane’s people would know it too, the moment they searched her and found it, and meant Jace would come running straight into whatever waited for her before she’d finished setting the trap. She wasn’t ready to be found yet. She needed to be taken. She left it coiled on the pillow where he’d see it before he saw the note, because some part of her needed him to know she hadn’t forgotten it. She’d chosen to leave it behind on purpose.

The note took four attempts to get right. She settled on the truth, stripped down to its essentials: I love you. I’m doing this so nobody else I love gets hurt reaching for me. You already told me no, and you were right to, and I did it anyway. Don’t blame yourself.

She pressed one last kiss to his temple, featherlight, careful not to wake him, and made herself leave before her resolve found a crack to slip through.

She wasn’t leaving the last hard proof of Kane’s crimes somewhere it could be searched and burned while she was gone, and if Kane’s people wanted her cooperation, proof of his own guilt sitting under his nose might buy her time nobody else could. She tucked Walter’s original documents into the lining of her jacket, the one place a body search might reasonably miss.

The drive to Kane’s main office building stretched endless and immediate at once. She parked out front, walked to the front door, and let herself be seen near the security camera she’d clocked from the gala that seemed like forever ago.

They took her within minutes. Professional, efficient, no unnecessary violence—which told her everything about how badly Kane wanted her alive and cooperative.

A hood went over her head for the drive, disorienting but not unkind, and Emma spent the ride counting turns and estimating speed the way she’d trained herself to over the past weeks without ever expecting to need the skill this directly. Twelve minutes. Four turns. A stretch of rougher road near the end that suggested an industrial lot.