Page 15 of Howl Lotta Love

“Leave the bag. Move.” Even. No room in it for negotiation.

She caught the shift in him before he finished the sentence, dropped the argument she hadn’t even started, and let him steer her toward the stairwell instead of the car.

They didn’t make it.

Four of them came out of the shadows between parked cars at once—fast, coordinated, boxing both exits before Jace finished counting heads. Ski masks. Tactical gear under civilian jackets. No guns drawn, and that absence was its own kind of warning.

Capture. Not kill.

Worse, not better.

“Behind me.” He got a forearm across her collarbone and had her against the pillar before the nearest attacker finished his first step. That one moved wrong for a civilian—weight already forward on the balls of his feet, too balanced, the stillness of someone trained rather than scared. Shifter. Jace clocked it and didn’t slow down.

She didn’t stay behind the pillar.

Her heel came down through a car window a beat later, alarm shrieking, headlights strobing red-white-red across the concrete, and three more alarms went off in quick succession as she worked the row with the drilled, deliberate precision of someone who’d practiced exactly this. Deliberate. Loud. Exactly the kind of chaos four men counting on a quiet grab couldn’t afford.

Later, we are discussing the definition of behind me. Half fury. Half a feeling disturbingly close to pride.

Then the first man reached him and there was no room left in his skull for anything but the fight.

He let the wolf up.

Not the full shift—no room in a parking garage for that, and she was too close to risk what the control would cost—but enough. Claws instead of nails. His vision snapped gold at the edges, sound narrowing to breath and boots on concrete. One directive: clear the space, keep her upright, worry about the rest later.

The first man swung a fist that would’ve broken a human jaw. Jace caught it out of the air, bone giving under his grip, and had the man on the ground with a wrist bent the wrong direction before the scream finished leaving his throat.

The second came in low, trying for his knees. Jace pivoted, claws opening a line across the man’s forearm deep enough to send him stumbling backward into a parked sedan hard enough to buckle the door—another alarm shrieking to life on top of the first four, the whole garage lit up like a carnival gone wrong.

The third had a collapsible baton and knew how to use it, fast enough that a human opponent might’ve landed the hit. Jace wasn’t human right now. He caught the strike on his forearm, the shock of it rattling up into his shoulder, and put the man down with a single blow that cost him more restraint not to make lethal than it did to throw.

Blood in the air, sharp and copper. Sweat, adrenaline, too many car alarms going off at once. His pulse hammered somewhere outside normal human rhythm—every cell in him down to one calculation. Threat. Not-threat. Her.

Roman’s van screamed into the garage sideways before Jace finished with the third man, Diesel out the passenger door before it stopped rolling.

“Evening, gentlemen.” Roman, grinning ear to ear, waded in without breaking stride.

Diesel went straight for the man nearest Emma and put him down in two moves that looked almost gentle from a distance.

Emma’s fourth alarm cut out.

The silence hit Jace like a slap. His head snapped toward her on pure animal instinct, found her upright, unhurt, backed against a support pillar with a tire iron gripped in both fists and every intention of using it⁠—

—and he didn’t see the last man until the man was already moving.

He came from the blind side of the pillar. Shoved her hard enough that her cheekbone cracked against raw concrete, hard enough that Jace heard the impact from thirty feet away over the alarms and the fighting and his own pulse roaring in his ears.

Something moved through him then that went past fury and didn’t have a name yet. Her. Down. Blood already welling along her cheekbone. Nothing else in the garage existed.

He crossed the distance in under two seconds, claws out, vision gone fully white-gold, and the man who’d touched her did not get back up.

Jace stood over him for one full breath, chest heaving, every animal instinct screaming to finish it. It took real, physical effort to step back—to remember there were rules, a team watching, a woman on the ground who needed him steady more than she needed him dangerous.

He turned. Emma was already pushing herself up on one arm, refusing to stay down even now, and his chest cracked wide open at the sight of her trying.

“Get him talking,” Jace said, breathing hard, wolf receding under his skin in slow, furious increments he had to force one at a time. “I want a name.”

Roman knelt beside the last conscious attacker and went very still—the kind of still that meant bad news before he opened his mouth. “Boss.”