Forcing his fangs to retract, he focused on the other sounds coming from inside the house. He heard at least four distinct heartbeats. He strained to hear a fifth heartbeat, but everyone was pressed so closely together he couldn’t do it.
“I have no view of the occupants from the rear of the house,” Remy said into his mic.
Max moved his tiny surveillance camera up, positioning it on the edge of a side looking into the living room. The urge to peek was hard to resist, but he didn’t do it. If Wallace saw him, it would push the man over the edge for sure. With that in mind, he instead flipped the power switch on the camera, hoping it was sending a clear signal to Mike back at the response truck.
“Camera one set,” Max whispered into his mic as he moved around to the back of the house again. “You getting a clear visual inside the house?”
“We have a visual on camera one,” Mike’s voice came back softly in his earpiece. “Adult female and three kids huddled together on the floor near the couch. I can’t tell if any of them are injured, but they all seem to be moving. Adult male over by the front window. His back is to the others and he has a weapon in his right hand. It’s an automatic.”
Max reached the back of the house to see Remy crouched down by the door, peeking inside. The coast must have been clear if Remy was doing that, so Max moved to join him.
Beside him, Remy reached up and cautiously put pressure on the handle of the sliding glass door. Max didn’t expect it to be unlocked, but it was. Remy slid it open an inch. Now, they could hear and smell everything better.
Unfortunately, Max didn’t like what his ears and nose had to tell him. Blood had definitely been spilled in there, and Wallace was muttering to himself about not ever letting his family go.
“Remy. Max. If you can get in the house, do it,” Mike whispered in their earpieces. “Wallace just reloaded and the negotiator isn’t getting through to him. The way he’s waving the weapon around doesn’t give me a good feeling about this.”
“Roger that,” Max said softly.
Remy slid the glass door open the rest of the way and noiselessly slipped inside. Max joined him, easing his Sig Sauer out of its holster as he went. He normally would have used his M4 carbine for a house entry like this, but with so many hostages in such a small space, he couldn’t take the risk. He noticed that Remy was following his lead, pulling his own 10mm auto out as they both moved through the kitchen and down the hallway toward the living room.
“Baby, why are you doing this?” Eileen Wallace pleaded in a quavering voice. “We came home with you.”
Max commended her for trying to talk some sense into her husband. He only prayed she’d be able to say something that would help this turn out differently than he feared it would.
“You came home?” Wallace shouted. “You never should have fucking left! Who the hell do you think you are, walking away from me, taking my kids with you?”
Every heartbeat in the living room kicked up a notch. It didn’t take Mike coming on the radio telling them Wallace was moving toward his family with his weapon pointed straight at them to understand the situation had rapidly gone from bad to worse. Wallace was done ranting.
“Nick, please!” she begged. “We love you. Why do you keep treating us like this?”
Wallace didn’t answer. A moment later, Max heard a cry of surprise, followed by a slap.
“Go now!” Mike ordered.
Max didn’t hesitate. He slipped out of the hallway and into the living room, his weapon raised and his finger on the trigger. He quickly jerked it away at the sight before him.
Shit.
Nina and Natasha were on the floor, their mother shielding them with her body even as blood flowed freely from a freshly split lip. Wallace was standing in front of his wife and daughters, holding Terence close to his chest, a small-caliber automatic pressed to the boy’s temple. The man’s eyes were red, bloodshot, and glassy, like he’d been drinking for hours. His eyes narrowed when he saw Max.
“You!” he sneered, his eyes fixed on Max, all but ignoring Remy as the other werewolf moved off to the side and pointed a weapon straight at Max’s head. “You’re the one who took my family away from me!”
Max suspected Wallace would have shot him right then if he could have taken his weapon away from Terence’s head long enough to do it. But even drunk, the man was smart enough to know the gun he was holding on his son was the only thing keeping Remy from killing him.
“I didn’t take your family away,” Max said quietly. “You did that all on your own.”
Max slowly lowered his weapon, holstering his gun and taking a step toward Terence and his father. There was a risk Wallace would say the hell with it and put a bullet in Max’s head. That would be fatal, even for a werewolf. But he had to do something to get Terence away from the man.
“The first time you punched your kids and your wife, you lost a little piece of them,” Max continued.
He was so close now he could almost reach out and touch Terence. Behind Nick, outside the front window, Max saw Mike, Diego, Coletti, Alvarez, and half a dozen uniformed officers closing in on the house. But none of them could take a shot, not without risking an innocent.
“And every time you hit them after that, you lost a little more,” Max said, remembering exactly how being the victim of an abusive father had felt. “Until you were nothing more to them than the man who beat them. That’s when you really lost them.”
He took another step closer. Wallace was so different than his own father, yet so similar at the same time. Even the bleary, half-defiant, half-accepting glare in those eyes was the same.
“Your wife held out longer because she loved you before you were like this,” Max told him. “But how many times did you think you could hit her and her children before she started to despise you?”
