Page 66 of Howl Lotta Love

“I don’t care about the ledgers.” His voice cracked entirely. “I don’t care about any of it. Stay awake. Stay with me.”

Down the trail, Gerri appeared at the far end of the ruined bridge with a speed that defied every law of physics anyone present understood, blocking the Chairman’s only remaining path off the mountain with nothing but her own small, immovable presence and an expression that dared him to try getting past her.

Nobody asked how she’d gotten there. Nobody was going to get a straight answer if they did.

Federal agents closed the last of the distance within minutes, the Chairman’s twenty years of careful invisibility ending in handcuffs on a mountain trail at dawn.

None of it registered for Jace. Emma was fading in his arms, blood loss and shock pulling her under faster than he could think, and for the first time in the entire war he’d been fighting, he had absolutely no plan left. No tactic. No strategy. Only a woman he loved bleeding out on a mountain trail and a storm building fast and dark on the horizon.

“Milo!” The shout tore out of him raw. “MILO, NOW!”

Milo reached them at a dead run, kit open, and got a compress against Emma’s side with hands that had done this a hundred times but never once for someone this important to the man holding her.

“Deep laceration, significant blood loss. She needs a hospital, and she needs it faster than this storm is going to allow.” Milo’s voice stayed clinical even as his own hands moved fast enough to betray the urgency underneath. “The ranger cabin’s closer than anywhere else. I can stabilize her there until the weather breaks.”

“Then that’s where we’re headed. Now.”

Jace gathered Emma against his chest, careful of the wound, and carried her up the trail toward the cabin through a storm that had finally, fully broken loose overhead, rain and wind screaming past them both while he held her like she was the only solid thing left in the world.

“Stay with me,” he said, low, urgent, mouth close to her ear as he walked. “I need you to stay with me, because I have things left to say and I am not saying them to somebody who isn’t listening.”

Her eyes cracked open, glassy but present.

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve loved you since the ballroom, and there was no talking myself out of it by the time those elevator doors opened on the worst-timed, best thing that ever happened to me. I have loved you every single day since with a certainty that terrified me before I let myself accept it.” His voice came out rough, unguarded, every wall he’d built over a lifetime of self-sufficiency finally, completely down. “You are the reason I understand what my father meant when he said a real alpha isn’t the one who needs nobody. You are the reason I know exactly what I’m protecting when I say I’ll protect this pack with my life. It was never only the pack, Emma. It was always going to be you, from the second I caught you at that gala and forgot how words worked for four straight seconds.”

“That’s…” Her voice wavered, thin but steady underneath it. “That’s the most you’ve ever said to me at once.”

“I’ve been holding all of it back. I’m done with that.” Behind them, Roman and Diesel had already peeled off toward the tree line to hold a perimeter against the storm and anything else still out there; this part, they’d silently agreed, belonged to Jace alone. He kicked the cabin door open and carried her inside out of the worst of the storm, laying her down as gently as his shaking hands allowed. “I need you to fight. I need you to stay, because I don’t know how to be the man I’ve become without you standing next to me while I do it.”

Emma’s hand found his, weak but certain, fingers curling around his with everything she had left.

“I’ve known for weeks.” Her eyes held his, steady despite everything her body was fighting through. “I’ve known since the safe house, maybe before. I used to think loving someone meant becoming smaller, quieter, less myself, because that’s what the last one taught me. You never once asked me to be smaller. You only kept showing up, over and over, choosing every version of me I brought into a room. My heart already made its choice a long time ago, Jace Maddox, and I am not done yet. Not even close.”

He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing her in like it might be the last time he got the chance, and held on with everything he had while the storm closed in around the cabin and Milo worked fast and steady to keep the woman he loved from slipping any further away.

No matter what happened next, Jace had never been more certain of anything in his life: he wasn’t leaving her side again.

TWENTY

EMMA

Emma woke to gray morning light through a cracked window and the steady, unmistakable sound of Jace’s heartbeat under her ear.

The storm had passed sometime in the night. She could tell by the quiet, by the way the cabin no longer shook with every gust, by the thin band of sun finding its way through the curtains. Her side ached in a deep, newly-stitched way that told her Milo had done careful work while she drifted in and out, and her strength, while still thin, had stopped feeling borrowed on credit.

Milo had stepped out at first light to radio Tucker an update, leaving the cabin quiet.

“You’re awake.” Jace’s voice came rough with sleep and a tension that hadn’t fully released since the bridge. He slid sideways, careful of her side, and pressed his lips to her forehead like he needed to confirm she was real before he trusted the sight of her. “How do you feel?”

“As if I got into a fight with a bridge and the bridge won.” She flexed her fingers, testing. “Sore. Stitched. Deeply unwilling to fall off anything ever again. Ten out of ten, wouldn’t recommend the gorge experience to a friend.”

“Milo says you were lucky. Another inch and that laceration would have needed surgery instead of stitches.” His arms tightened around her, careful but certain. “Watching you fall took ten years off my life. I’m fairly sure I aged out of my thirties somewhere over that gorge.”

“I noticed. You screamed my name as if the world were ending, which, considering the circumstances, was a reasonable overreaction.”

“It was ending. My version of it, anyway.” His palm found her cheek instead, unhurried despite the urgency still audible underneath his calm. “Kane and the Chairman are both in federal custody. Roman confirmed it an hour ago. No matter what comes next, that part’s over.”