Jace (River Pack Wolves 2) (Paranormal Romance)

by Alisa Woods

  Jace let out a low, long breath of patience. “I do not give a fuck what your family problems are,” he finally ground out. “But I care very much about whether I’ve got Army shifters going missing. Or not. Both of you need to knock this shit off and work together to figure this out. Then you can go back to whatever passes for family relations in the Wilding pack. But not before we get solid intel on whether your brother is missing.”

  Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know my sister like I do, Jace. She lies for a living now, but she’s always been a manipulator. You can’t trust her.”

  Piper cringed—partly because it was true, but mostly because she was afraid it would turn Jace against her just as he was starting to come around. He turned back to her, doubt creating shadows on his face.

  “Soldiers get reassigned all the time,” Jace said, carefully. “Maybe he’s just gone dark for a mission. What makes you think he’s gone missing?”

  “Because I talk to him every day.” She lifted her chin to Daniel. “We have an actual relationship, unlike this hot mess.” Back to Jace, with a lowered voice. “He wouldn’t just go dark with no warning. I swear. Something is wrong.” That much was the God’s honest truth. She prayed he would hear it in her voice.

  Jace frowned and nodded. “All right.” He took a breath. “In the morning, we’ll discuss this with my brothers and make a game plan—”

  “Morning?” Piper’s voice hiked up. “Why do you think I’m here in the middle of the night? We need to get on this, like yesterday!” She tried to bring her voice back down to reasonable. “Daniel has access to the Joint Base. He’s got clearance. I can’t even get on site, but he could get in there anytime and access their records, see what’s happened—”

  Daniel’s mouth fell open. “You want me to hack the Joint Base records?” He acted as if she’d asked him to streak naked across the base. Actually, no—he would have laughed at that. This was worse. Much worse. This was their father’s territory, and she was asking him to piss all over it.

  “Daniel’s right,” Jace said, his voice calm. “You can’t go blustering into—”

  “Blustering?” She completely failed to keep her voice down. “I could do it with my hands tied behind my back. Even this blundering amateur—”

  Daniel growled at her. “I’m not risking my security clearance for this!”

  “It’s a bad idea, Piper,” Jace said, but his voice was strained again. “We know from when Cassie was taken that they are government types involved in this, but we don’t know how far it goes. Let me and my brothers handle this from the outside, so we don’t tip them off.”

  Dammit. He wasn’t going to help her after all. “Sure. Let’s take our time. Meanwhile, Noah’s in a dark cell somewhere being tortured.” She could hardly keep the tremble out of her voice.

  “We don’t know that!” Daniel protested.

  “You’re right,” she spat back. “He could already be dead.” She was seriously going to give him some facial scars as a souvenir before she left.

  “Okay, okay!” Jace threw his hands up, holding Piper and Daniel apart. “Let’s cool this down a bit, shall we?” He pointed to Daniel. “You sit tight and think about what we can do for intel. And stop being an ass.” Then he turned to Piper. “You get a guest room and park it for a while. And stop assuming the worst before we know anything at all, okay?”

  Her breath was heaving, and she wanted to tell him to fuck off—it wasn’t his brother that was possibly being tortured to death. Instead, she did a quick scan of the room. Daniel had always been a neat freak, and the Army had just reinforced those habits. Everything was neatly put away, including a light-weight jacket hanging on the back of the bedroom door.

  She looked back to Jace’s questioning expression and wrestled her voice into a semblance of conciliation. “All right. We’ll talk about this in the morning.” She turned her back on him and strode to the door, counting on him to take a moment to talk to Daniel before they left.

  “We’re going to work this out,” Jace said to her brother.

  She took that instant to slip her hand inside her brother’s jacket and get the one thing she really needed. Then she pulled open the door and marched into the hallway, covering the sway of the jacket with the motion of the flung-open door. She slipped her prize into her front pocket as she went.

  Jace’s footsteps followed quickly after her. “Hey,” he said, catching her by the elbow again. “This way.” He nodded down the hall in the opposite direction.

  She swung around and followed him down a couple turns in this gigantic estate of his to a room similar to Daniel’s but smaller. Jace opened the door and gestured her inside.

  “It’s going to be all right, Piper.” His voice was gentle, and the fire in his eyes had softened. “Hopefully, Noah’s completely fine, just holed up somewhere. And if not, we’re going to find him.”

  “Sure.” She tried to sound positive, but her skills were failing her—too much personal entanglement was eroding her ability to do her job. Once she found Noah, she was going to take that assignment in Bolivia she’d been avoiding and get lost in hot Latin men for a while. Get back to her normal state of not giving a shit about anything except work. And her baby brother.

  Jace frowned. His eyes were deep brown, like Noah’s, and filled with a genuine concern that made her face heat. Like he saw right through her, which somehow both thrilled and terrified her. Plus the scruff on his face, at least a day’s worth, and the bed-tossed hair standing on end just made him insanely sexy in the moonlight. Her wolf wanted nothing more than to drag him into the room with her and spend the next couple hours finding out just how delicious Jace River’s body could be. But she had a mission—a brother to find, alive or dead—and taking Jace River to bed wasn’t going to help with that. At least… not anymore.

  “We are going to find him,” Jace repeated, softly, reassuring. “I’ll come get you when everyone’s up.”

  “Okay.” She schooled her face to hide the roiling emotion under her skin.

  He nodded and turned to leave.

  She almost called him back to thank him—for caring, for putting Daniel in his place, for trying to reassure her—but she held herself in check. Wouldn’t matter anyway.

  She didn’t plan on seeing him again.

  Jace finished the last bite of his sandwich just as the sun came up.

  The warm glow spilled through the windows of the great room and painted the kitchen’s stainless steel appliances rosy red. The house was just now starting to stir—which was remarkable, given that Piper, Daniel, and he had practically brawled over rescuing her brother Noah—but the sounds of people awakening upstairs meant his time was running out.

  He’d been using his tablet to search for possible disappearances of military grunts like Noah, but the information he could access publicly from the safehouse was extremely limited. His office at Riverwise was better equipped—there he had access to a couple private military networks where he could scan the back-channel chatter. Nothing that was security-related, but if there were suddenly a lack of communication from a lot of personnel, that would show up. Once his brothers, Jaxson and Jared, rolled out of their respective beds, the three of them could form a plan on how to tackle this. Maybe a trip to the office for more extensive research. Or maybe Daniel could get them into the Joint Base. They might have better access there if they could get away with it. The trick would be poking around without tipping their hand to Agent Smith—or whatever his real name was.

  Just as Jace was stowing his now-clean sandwich plate and trying to decide whether to barge in on Jaxson and Olivia’s post-mating honeymoon, the pair stumbled into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and smelling of the hot sex they no doubt had been having all night long.

  “Hey, you two,” Jace said with a growl. “Can you wipe off the smiles? The rest of us are trying to have a miserable morning.” He couldn’t help the twinge inside when he thought about Jaxson finally finding his true mate. Olivia was won
derful, and Jace didn’t begrudge his brother a second of their happiness, but it was hard to look them in the face and know they had something he never would.

  At least now their pack had a fully mated alpha to lead them and lend them strength. Jace could have filled that role, except for the glaring fact that he couldn’t shift—not without endangering the very people he was supposed to protect—and due to that, he could never mate. Other than that, he was the perfect candidate! The truth was, Jaxson was the right brother to be their pack alpha, but Jace hadn’t, technically, even submitted to him—at least, not since Jace was discharged. He had pledged his allegiance in human form, but that meant no magic bond to strengthen his alpha and his pack as a whole. If he had been able to take a mate, that bond would have been even stronger.

  Just one more way Jace was unable to fulfill his duties.

  He shoved those thoughts deep into the dark place where his inner wolf stayed locked away, at least during the daylight hours. He needed to stay on task, and right now, that meant helping Piper find her missing brother, Noah.

  “Good morning, brother!” Jaxson declared with excessive joy, his hand tucked at Olivia’s waist and a smile wide on his face.

  She gestured to the window behind her, with its view of the blue-tinged mountains, now turning hazy with the pink dawn and early morning mist. “How can you be miserable on a gorgeous day like this?” she asked.

  “Some of us didn’t enjoy the night quite as much as others,” Jace said with a smirk.

  Olivia blushed, but her smile and glowing happiness stayed strong.

  Jaxson’s grin dimmed when he finally took a good look at Jace. He hadn’t bothered with a mirror this morning, or a shave, but he was sure there were black shadows under his eyes and the makings of a ragged beard. And Jaxson was always worrying about him even on the best of days.

  His brother tried to resurrect his smile as he lifted his chin to Jace. “Seriously, man. Jared is the brother who’s supposed to be miserable all the time, not you.”

  “Yeah, well, I need to talk to him, too.” Jace glanced toward the stairs. No one had yet wandered down, and Jared slept hard. “I’ll pay you hundred dollars to wake him. Last time, he nearly took my face off with those daggers he claims are claws.”

  “Something’s up,” Jaxson said, frowning. It was a statement. Neither of them would bother waking Jared unless it was an emergency.

  “We had a visitor last night,” Jace said, “and she’s still here. Daniel’s sister, Piper, crashed the safehouse at three in the morning. Says her brother is missing. A younger one, not Daniel.”

  “Missing?” Jaxson’s scowl grew darker. “And you think it’s connected to the others?”

  Jace shrugged. They had so little intel to go on. “I think we need to get busy and find this Agent Smith character. I hate to interrupt your honeymoon, but…”

  Jaxson pulled Olivia closer to him, fingers laced together. “We’ll have a real honeymoon once this is all over, right, baby?”

  She nodded, a tight smile on her face. “Missing shifters trumps everything.” She looked at Jace. “Do we know when Piper’s brother went missing?”

  Jace rubbed the back of his neck. “Not exactly. Not even completely sure he is missing. His name’s Noah. And he’s an Army grunt.”

  “Military shifters?” Jaxson loosened his hold on Olivia and straightened.

  “Yeah, and he went missing overseas. I don’t like it, Jaxson. Could be more kinds of bad than I even want to think about. And Piper is crazy freaked out. Of course, she’s a Wilding, so…” He left that hanging because the Wilding’s really took after their pack name.

  “I’ve never met her,” Jaxson said, frowning. “Is she another Terra?”

  Jace huffed a short laugh. “Yeah, if Terra were counterintelligence with a penchant for breaking and entering.” He shook his head. The whole pack was clearly out there, but you didn’t get into counterintelligence, even as a civilian, without having something on the ball.

  Jaxson’s eyebrows lifted. “counterintelligence? Alrighty, then.”

  “Yeah.” Jaxson had to fight to rein in the smirk. “She’s a handful.” He’d actually had a handful of her, and his wolf wasn’t forgetting that any time soon. She was unpredictable, and she pissed him off with her recklessness, but damn, she had felt good when he had his paws on her. There were all kinds of smoldering hotness inside that short, voluptuous frame of hers, and he halfway hoped that, if they found Noah, she might be grateful the way Terra had been when they rescued her little sister Cassie. The crawling in his bed kind of grateful. Terra wasn’t his type, but Piper… Jace’s wolf surged up from the dark pit, making Jace suck in a breath. Then again, maybe not. His wolf wanted her in his bed even more than Jace. And that was flat dangerous.

  Just one more thing his wolf would ruin for him.

  Jace blew out the breath he’d been holding. “The thing is, I’m not entirely sure her brother’s actually missing. Have we started work on tracking down Agent Smith? I know you’ve been… busy… but I thought Jared was working intel on this last night. Do you know?”

  “I’ll go boot him out of bed and get him down here. See what he’s got.” Jaxson trotted over to the stairs and headed up.

  Olivia bit her lip and looked as anxious as Jace felt. He genuinely regretted intruding upon their happiness, but getting through this would require all of their pack working together—and probably pulling in help from the Wildings as well. Noah was part of their pack, after all. But all the local area packs looked to the River pack wolves for leadership on this kind of thing, given Riverwise was private security and almost all their pack had military backgrounds.

  Olivia edged closer to him, anxiety deepening her frown. “I know you don’t trust witches, but I promise you, Jace, I love your brother like I’ve never loved any man on earth. Or shifter.”

  Jace held up a hand and waved away her concern—she was half witch, and he generally despised the species, but he knew she was different. And she had saved Jaxson from his own dark secret, one Jace hadn’t even seen. “It’s obvious you make Jaxson happy. Not much I can object to with that. And the mating bond between the two of you makes the pack stronger. It’s all good, just took me by surprise is all. Besides, having a few allies in a certain powerful downtown Seattle coven might help us unravel this thing.” It hadn’t occurred to him before, but maybe Olivia’s family—the Damon coven—would be able to help them track down Noah. Or at least see if he truly was missing.

  “Not sure the coven really wants to be involved in pack business.” Olivia grimaced. “But I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  Jace gave her a sharp nod. He’d take help from the witches, if offered, but he certainly wasn’t going to go begging… and he really only trusted Olivia to have shifters’ best interests at heart.

  Pounding footsteps down the stairs made him think Jaxson had managed to rouse Jared from his typical crashed-out state. The oldest River brother had his own nightmarish past, but he was better at working it out than Jace. And Jared wasn’t a danger to anyone. He could shift and let his wolf form run out all of his horror at the things that had happened and the things he had done. Jace didn’t have that luxury, not when there were people around who could be hurt by it. Which meant Jared paid his penance by hitting the mountains or the shooting range for endless hours, exhausting himself, and when he hit the sack, he hit it hard. Crashing like the dead man Jace suspected his brother longed to be.

  Both his brothers lumbered into the kitchen with Daniel close behind.

  “I figured if everyone was getting up…” Daniel shrugged.

  Jace just nodded. Piper’s brother should be part of this conversation, anyway. Piper too, but Jace wasn’t quite ready to deal with her brand of Wilding insanity just yet. Better to have a plan first.

  Jaxson hooked a thumb toward Jared. “Tell Jace what you were telling me.”

  Their oldest brother was the largest among them, although none of the River brothers
was exactly small. The shifter gene, plus their military training and staying in shape for their business, meant they were all pretty well bulked up. Jaxson was an ex-SEAL and Jace was a former Army medic, but Jared was all Marine. And it showed.

  He ran a hand through his hair, which was mussed. His sleep must have been restless at some point, even if he slept like the dead. “I’ve been trying to access some of the local military information systems. Nothing classified, just poking around to see if anyone has heard of this Agent Smith. And I’ve uploaded a sketch to our office facial recognition software—it’s scanning some of the law enforcement and city-wide camera databases to see if we can track down who this guy really is. It’s only been a day since we kicked his ass, but he could have flown that little two-seater airplane anywhere. I kind of doubt we’ll get lucky and find him in Seattle.”

  Daniel spoke up. “If he’s got another base of operations nearby, he might stick around.”

  It was a decent possibility.

  “Somehow, I doubt he’s gone far,” Jace said. “But wherever he is, he’s got to be deep undercover. Even if he’s not showing his face now, he’s got to have some history. Maybe cruising up to an ATM to pull out cash for that cheap government suit he was wearing.”

  Jared snorted. “Yeah, maybe. I’m tapped into all the databases back at Riverwise. Hasn’t pinged anything yet. I’ve got an alert set up on my phone.”

  Jace gave him a nod, impressed. Jared was actually bringing his A-game to this, rather than heading off to the forest, per usual, to get lost in the woods—literally and figuratively.

  Jaxson gestured to Daniel. “You’re Army, right? Where are you stationed while you’re stateside?”

  Jace grimaced. They’d already had this fight, last night, with Piper.

  Daniel’s face pinched in, but he kept it cool. “The Joint Base at Lewis-McChord. My father is a Lieutenant Colonel there.” He threw a pained look to Jace. “But Piper is right—he’s really not the best one to go to for help. Not unless you’ve already got solid intel.”