Chapter 16

Triana sat tied to the chair in the study, tears in her eyes as Quinn went into great detail about how her father had been murdered, while Lee sat in the chair opposite her, smiling.

She had no idea which of the men was more insane: Quinn, who seemed to get off on describing the killing, or Lee, who obviously enjoyed seeing the pain on her face. Either way, all she could think about was what it would be like to do the same thing to these two that they’d done to her father.

“There were five hunters in all,” Quinn said. “They told me they never go out in teams of fewer than that. And every time they go out, they treat it like a military operation. Quick, efficient, and with one purpose—to kill every werewolf they find.” His mouth curved into a sneer. “I got to go along to watch, just to confirm the kill for Mr. Lee. I have to say, I was impressed.”

If Triana hadn’t been so upset about her father, she would have been terrified there were people out there like Quinn and Lee who were so delusional they really believed this stuff enough to hunt down and butcher people.

“They were the coldest bastards I think I’ve ever seen in my life,” Quinn said, shaking his head. “And that’s saying a lot. But they weren’t lying when they said they were efficient. Those boys really knew what the hell they were doing.”

Quinn walked over to the window, looking outside at the rain pouring down beyond the broad balcony outside the study. Then he glanced at his watch, leaving her to wonder how much more time she had.

“They had this spray they put all over themselves and me,” Quinn continued as he stared out at the rain. “I couldn’t smell a damn thing, but they said it would mask our scents from a werewolf. I thought that was pretty cool. Then those five boys kicked in the front door and walked right into the club and started shooting. Two of them were carrying big old dart guns the size of an elephant rifle. The darts were full of some kind of animal tranquilizer they said would slow down your dad enough for the kill shot.”

Fresh tears rolled down her face as she listened to the story of her father being treated like some kind of poor animal that didn’t even matter.

“I don’t want to hear any more,” she begged. “Just stop.”

Quinn laughed, turning to look at her. “But I’m getting to the best part. See, the two guys with the dart guns were like the junior team members. The other three—they were the real hunters. They all carried silenced weapons, and when the shooting started, they went for heart and head shots. I have to hand it to your father; he really was a tough son of a bitch. Even with five hunters getting the drop on him, he gave them the shit. Pumped full of enough tranquilizers to knock out an elephant and hit about half a dozen times, he still kept coming. He ripped out the throats of those two boys with the dart guns and was heading for another when the leader of the group—a big fucking dude with eyes that would make a shark piss its pants—stepped up and ended it with a shot through your daddy’s head.” He grinned. “Bam! From, like, two feet away. Fucking brains went everywhere.”

Triana was crying so hard she could barely talk, but she forced out the words she needed to say. “You people are insane. You killed a man—my father—not a werewolf!”

Quinn only laughed. Lee, on the other hand, stood up and walked over to stand so close to her that she almost knocked over the chair trying to get away from him. Lee leaned down even closer but then stopped, momentarily distracted by a popping sound from outside. Quickly dismissing it, he turned his attention back to her.

“Yes, we are insane, Ms. Bellamy,” he said softly. “Which is something I hope your mother takes into account when it comes to giving me what I want. Because if she doesn’t give me that necklace, what those hunters did to your father will pale in comparison to what I’m going to do to you.”

Looking into the man’s cold eyes, Triana shivered as goose bumps raced up her back. “Mom says she doesn’t have the necklace.”

“She’s lying.” Lee turned away and walked back to his chair, sitting again. “Quinn saw it on the body after your father was killed. Your mother must have taken it off before he was buried. I know it’s not there now because I dug him up to look.”

Triana had thought she was done being shocked by these men. She was wrong. They had actually dug up her father? She was about to call Lee every foul name she’d ever heard—and she’d heard a lot of them—when his phone rang.

Lee answered, listening for a moment. Then he got to his feet, the smile on his face twisted into anger. “What the hell are you talking about? She’s one old woman.”

He clenched his teeth together so hard Triana thought he might shatter them. Even Quinn looked concerned.

“Yes, you incompetent idiot,” Lee ground out. “I’ll be right there. Don’t let her go anywhere, or the next person getting shot will be you.”

“Everything okay, boss?” Quinn asked when Lee hung up.

Lee scowled. “That was security. It seems that Mrs. Bellamy has arrived. She shot one of the guards at the front gate in the leg and is currently threatening to shoot the other two guards and throw the necklace in the swamp unless I come out and guarantee her safe passage to see her daughter.”

Triana’s heart started beating faster at the knowledge that her mother was here and actually going to come in. What was her mom doing? She couldn’t think that a promise from a man like Lee meant anything.

“Don’t you dare hurt her!” Triana shouted at Lee and Quinn as they turned to leave.

Ignoring her, Lee opened the heavy double doors and motioned to the men outside the room. “Get more security to the front gate; then bring the girl downstairs. Keep her quiet until I have what I need; then kill her.”

Triana was still shouting at Lee to leave her mother out of this when two muscular men with bored expressions on their faces untied her from the chair and dragged her out of the room.

* * *

“Lee and a large group of security guards are headed for the front gate in three SUVs,” Drew announced over the radio earpiece secured in Remy’s ear, speaking louder than usual so he could be heard over the wind and rain. “It appears Gemma shooting that guard did the trick. You’ve got your distraction.”

Remy growled, not sure what frustrated him more—that Drew had forced his way onto this operation or that Gemma had gotten a gun somewhere. He pushed both thoughts from his mind as he and Max jumped the fence along the back side of Lee’s property and ran toward the main house the moment they hit the rain-soaked grass on the far side. They had about four hundred feet of open ground to cover, which would have normally been a suicide mission any other day of the week. But with the distraction Gemma was providing and the rain coming down so hard it was tough seeing more than twenty feet ahead of them, Remy hoped they’d be okay.

His gut clenched with worry, Remy tried to ignore the sense of fear bubbling to the surface and put on all the speed his werewolf abilities could muster. Pushing himself that hard made his fangs and claws slip out too, but it was a small price to pay for the swiftness he needed.

Fighting the wind and avoiding the occasional piece of flying debris slowed him and Max down a little, but they still made it to the house in less than thirty seconds. They’d just reached the cover of the stacked stone wall that made up the back of Lee’s ungodly expensive plantation home when Brooks’s calm voice came across the radio.

“I’m in the garage and I’m picking up scents as well as the sounds of movement on the far side of a set of double doors that lead into the house,” he said softly. “Multiple males, one female. Standing by to move on your word, but this door is seriously heavy duty. It might take me a while to get through it.”

Of course Lee has heavy doors connecting his monster garage to his monster house, Remy thought. The asshole probably stole them from a frigging castle in Germany.

“Roger that,” he whispered softly around his fangs. His control was shot to shit at the moment, so he was having a difficult time getting them to retract. “Max and I are at the back and moving in to get a fix on Triana’s location.”

He and Max slipped around to the pool entrance, hesitating long enough to confirm there weren’t any other guards back there, then snapped the lock on the french doors that led inside. The sounds of a TV show reached him at the same time Triana’s scent hit him in the face, almost making him shift further.

Remy fought down the urge and stepped into the kitchen, only to freeze as a numbing cascade of sensations washed over him. Shit, it felt like someone had shoved him under a waterfall of human emotions. All at once he was hit with a painful pinching feeling around his wrists, a sense of dread that had his gut nearly heaving, and an overpowering fear that made his heart start beating so hard he thought it might burst.

Max grabbed his arm, concern on his face. You okay? he mouthed.

For a moment, Remy wasn’t sure he was okay. He was having a hard time getting control of all the bizarre sensations bombarding him. He was drowning in a sea of emotions and feelings that weren’t his own, and it was disorienting as hell.

“Remy, what’s your status in there?” Drew called out over the radio, his voice jarring Remy out of the sensory overload loop he’d been stuck in. “Lee and his men are at the gate and if you don’t do something soon, we’re going to be in trouble out here.”

Remy shook his head to clear it and crossed the immense kitchen, with its high-end cabinets and expensive granite countertops, toward Triana’s scent. Drew and Zane were out front covering Gemma by themselves, and if the situation out there turned into a shoot-out, they faced the serious possibility of getting overwhelmed, especially if Zane had to hold back and not reveal his true nature to the NOPD cop they hadn’t been able to dissuade from coming along to help. If Lee’s men got past Drew and Zane, Gemma wouldn’t stand a chance.

Max kept him covered as Remy slipped out of the kitchen, through a huge dining room, and down a long hall. He stopped just before an arched opening to the right of the hallway, not needing his nose or his ears to tell him Triana was nearby. He swore he could frigging feel her just inside the room beyond. The urge to run in there and save her was hard to get a grip on.

He took a breath and focused on what he knew he had to do—he had to think instead of acting out of instinct, as much as the werewolf inside might have wanted to.

Taking a deeper breath, he picked up Brooks’s fainter scent. After getting himself oriented to the layout of the house, he realized the door his pack mate was waiting behind led to the room Triana was in. That was good. It meant they’d be able to come into the room from two sides at once.

Remy dropped to his knees by the arched entryway, then closed his eyes and extended his senses. Normally a SWAT officer in this kind of situation would pull out a small hand mirror and use it to check out the room beyond, but that wasn’t necessary when you were a werewolf.

Using his nose and ears, he was able to paint a picture of the number of people in the room and where they were located. He knew that Triana was on the right side of the room, while the four men inside were scattered around her in a loose semicircle. Based on their positions in the room, all four of the men seemed to be facing in some direction other than the entryway Remy was kneeling in. Another bit of good luck. He reached down and fingered the gris-gris bag Gemma had given him all those years ago. Just keep working, he prayed. Just help me get Triana out of this.

He leaned forward a little to get a quick visual, then jerked his head back. What he’d seen in that one second had confirmed what his other senses had told him. It also scared the hell out of him at the same time.

To the left side of the large, posh living room, two men stood by a short set of stairs that led to the heavy oak doors Brooks had described. Another man was standing in front of an expensive wide-screen TV, apparently intent on watching a guy with shorts, tattoos, and a shocking head of bleached-blond hair shove a whole burrito in his mouth on some kind of cooking show.

About twenty feet away, on the right side of the room, Triana was sitting on the couch, looking terrified. Her heart was hammering in her chest and her wrists were bound cruelly in front of her. The sight of her made his fangs shove out even farther. He wanted to kill every man who had dared to touch her.

Remy took a deep breath and forced himself to stop thinking about that as he considered the last man in the room, the one standing closest to Triana, a pistol held casually and comfortably in his hands. Remy’s werewolf instincts told him this was the most dangerous man in the room. The way the guy looked at Triana made Remy want to storm into the room to protect her. But Remy couldn’t do that, not with how close the man was standing to Triana, ready to shoot her.

He needed the man distracted long enough for him to either put a bullet in him or run into the room and get Triana out of there. And after a few seconds of thought, he knew exactly how to do it.

Getting to his feet, Remy took a few steps back, covering his mouth as he whispered into his radio mic. “Brooks, I need you to set a charge on the center of the double doors and blow them on my mark.”

There was only the barest hint of hesitation on Brooks’s part. As the senior officer on the team, Brooks could have nixed the plan, but Remy knew his pack mate wouldn’t do that because the woman Remy cared about was at risk.

“The wood is going to frag,” Brooks whispered. “Is Triana clear of the door?”

“She will be,” Remy said firmly. “Be ready to go in ten seconds.”

“Roger that,” Brooks confirmed. “On your mark.”

Remy motioned to Max, making sure the younger werewolf knew what they were doing and that Remy wanted him to focus on the man by the TV. Turning back to the entryway, he dropped to one knee and forced himself to relax. The man standing right next to Triana would be his responsibility. When the door charge blew on the left side of the room, the man would instinctively turn and throw up his hands to protect himself—it was a reflex reaction that couldn’t be overruled. That would give Remy the time he needed to get to the man before he hurt Triana.

But for his plan to work, he needed to get Triana’s attention—and pray she remembered those hand signals he’d shown her a couple of days ago. Because if either of those two things failed to happen, Triana would get hit by the door debris. The thought of the damage that would do to her was simply something he refused to think about.

* * *

Triana’s pulse raced as she sat on the couch in Lee’s living room. She was scared to death for her mom. What was happening outside at the front gate? Would the next ring of a cell phone mean these insane bastards had killed her mother and were about to do the same to her? With her hands still tied and four big, armed men surrounding her, she doubted there was anything she could do to stop any of this, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to sit here and wait for it to happen.

She glanced down at the big coffee table in front of the couch, her eyes coming to rest on the decorative wooden bowl full of shells, glass beads, and colored sand. It seemed out of place. Lee didn’t strike her as the kind of man who was into decorative anything unless it was arm candy. If she dumped out the stuff inside, the wood bowl might be heavy enough to bash someone’s head in.

She turned her head slightly, trying to see exactly where the guy behind her was standing. If she moved fast, she could grab the bowl, swing it around, and hit the jerk with the gun. If that worked, she could get the weapon and use it against the other three.

It was insane, especially since she wasn’t sure she could fire the weapon with her hands tied, even if she was lucky enough to get it. But it was a plan, and right now, she was ready to try anything.

As she reached toward the bowl in front of her, the strangest sensation she’d ever felt in her life came over her, almost taking her breath away. One second her heart was thudding in her chest and her whole body was shaking in fear, and the next, a feeling of deep calm washed over her.

Not understanding why she was even doing it, Triana glanced over her shoulder at the arched opening that led toward the back of the house. There, in the shadows of the leftmost side of the entryway, she saw something that made her eyes widen.

Remy was down on one knee, most of his face and body hidden by the frame of the entryway and the dark shadows cast by the lights in the living room. But she knew it was him. Even without seeing his face, she knew it was him. Relief swept through her, making her dizzy.

But at the same time, she felt a stab of fear. Was he here alone? Was he going to try to save her all by himself? Was he going to get himself killed charging into a room full of psychos? That thought was more terrifying than facing death herself.

Her first instinct was to shout at him to run, to save her mom and get out of there. But then she saw his hands move. At first she had no idea what he was doing. He had one hand up, his fingers splayed wide, while the other hand was horizontal to the floor. As she watched, one upraised finger went down, leaving four still up. Then another dropped, leaving three.

Her mind was transported to a happier memory, of the two of them walking through the French Quarter and him telling her how his SWAT teammates communicated with each other while on a raid by using hand signals.

Three fingers, now two.

He was counting down to something. The hand flat to the floor meant…oh crap, what did that mean?

As another finger dropped, she remembered.

Hand flat to the floor means get down!

Triana had a half second before the last finger closed into a fist to throw herself to the floor.

She’d barely hit the expensive wood when the room above her exploded in sound, smoke, and whistling debris. She heard grunts of pain and people falling, but then there was movement near her head, and even though the force of the blast had stunned her, she still turned around to see the man with the gun coming at her. There was blood running down the side of his face and he looked furious.

She tried to scramble away, but he was too close. He grabbed her hair and yanked her to her knees, the force of the motion twisting her neck so much she thought he might break it. She saw the gun coming up toward her head and realized she was going to die. She struggled, refusing to go like this with Remy so close and her mother in danger, but she knew it wasn’t going to make a difference.

Then a snarling growl ripped through the room, making the man with the gun freeze. Triana twisted her head toward the sound, ignoring how much it hurt.

Remy charged toward her, covering the distance across the room in a blur as he moved faster than anyone she’d ever seen. Then she saw the claws, the long white fangs, and the glowing, yellow eyes, and a part of her mind insisted it couldn’t possibly be Remy.

The guy with the gun hesitated for a moment, as shocked as Triana by what he saw. He seemed to be unsure if he should shoot her or the thing coming at him like a freight train. Finally, after a split second, he made up his mind and turned his gun on Triana.

That indecision provided Remy—or the thing she thought was Remy—all the time he needed. Triana screamed and tried to duck as the thing with the fangs and claws leaped straight at her, but the man still held her fast.

As Remy jumped completely over her, she heard a heavy thud and felt a slight tug in her hair as the man with the gun went down. There was another crash as Remy and the man hit the floor, then chaos reigned as the entire room seemed to go insane.

There was a loud pop of the man’s gun going off, a blur of movement to her left as one of Lee’s other men flew sideways through the air and smashed through the TV, and a huge shape at the far end of the living room that looked like Brooks throwing two men around like they were dolls. The man who’d been about to shoot her hit a bookcase, slamming into it so hard that part of the shelves collapsed.

Then Remy was down on his knees in front of her. The fangs and eyes she’d told herself must have been a construct of her fear-shredded imagination were still there, an unmistakable part of the man she’d spent the past five days with.

As they gazed into each other’s eyes, the room around them grew quiet. His eyes glowed gold, making her wonder if all those flashes of light she’d seen so many times hadn’t actually been a reflection at all. But even though they were a different color and were somehow lit from within, she still recognized them as Remy’s eyes. She even saw the worry and concern there in their strange depths.

He reached out a hand toward her and she instinctively scrambled back on the floor away from him. She hated herself for doing it, hated the pain she saw in his eyes even more, but she couldn’t have stopped herself if she’d tried. She was too confused to understand what was happening right then.

Triana wanted to say something, but no words would come. Outside, gunfire erupted, and she flinched. It took her half a second to realize the shooting was coming from the front gate.

“Mom,” she breathed.

She pushed herself to her feet, but before she could take more than two steps, Remy was at her side, scooping her up in his arms. The next thing she knew, he set her on her feet beside Max.

“Keep her here with you,” Remy ordered. Then, he and Brooks raced out of the room toward the sound of the gunfire.

Triana considered trying to dash around him for the door, but then remembered the blur of movement that had come right before Lee’s goon had crashed into the TV. Was Max like Remy? Some kind of freak with fangs and claws?

Afraid to think about it, she stood there as the shooting intensified outside, thinking about what she’d seen and praying her mother would be okay.