“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?”
