Gage took his eyes off the drawing of the floor plan of the school on the whiteboard to glance at Brooks. Tall with dark hair and brown eyes, he wasn’t only the commander of the SWAT team, but the alpha of their pack of alphas as well. “You’re here. Good.” He gestured toward the concerned-looking man and woman sitting near the opposite wall. “This is Eva Gilbert, the principal of the school, and Hugh Kennedy, the vice principal. Senior Corporal Jayden Brooks.”
Brooks gave them another nod. This time, they returned it.
“What’s the situation?” Brooks asked, turning back to Gage.
His commander jerked his thumb at the television monitor closest to him. “Pablo Garza, the kid with the gun, recently joined a local gang and showed up today to recruit some of his classmates. Fortunately, a teacher saw him flash a weapon when he got on campus and called 911 before he even stepped foot in the classroom. We were able to establish communications with him just in time to keep him from shooting his teacher, Selena Rosa, in the head. Since then, he’s dropped all the window shades and locked the only door into the room. He’s threatening to kill everyone, starting with Ms. Rosa. Pablo seems to have a real issue with her. Probably because she won’t back down from his threats.”
Thanks to the team’s resident tech guru, Eric Becker, they’d gotten multiple camera views inside the classroom from three direct angles. Pablo was standing in the middle of the room by himself, armed with what looked like a Desert Eagle .50 caliber automatic that he swung back and forth from one side of the group of students huddled against the wall to the other, making them cower in fear.
Zane once again calmly tried to convince Pablo to give himself up. That must have been the breaking point for the kid, because he took the cell phone away from his ear and slammed it against the wall, shattering it.
“Dammit!” Zane tossed his own phone onto the table, then reached out and flipped the switch on a box near the TV, filling the RV with screams, shouts, and sobbing from the classroom. “Pablo already shot out the school intercom, so now all we have is the audio feed Becker rigged up. It’s only one way, though, so the kid can’t hear me. Not that it matters. Pablo isn’t interested in negotiating. He doesn’t want anything beyond proving he’s tough. The way he sees it, the best way to do that is to stay in there and kill a few people, even if it means he dies in the process.”
The screams and sobs only seemed to push Pablo closer to the edge. He cursed in Spanish, screaming that he was going to kill everyone in the room, starting with the teacher and ending with a kid named Ruben.
Someone stepped away from the group near the wall, one hand out in front of her in a placating gesture. She was so petite that Brooks thought she was a student at first, but when she deliberately put herself between Pablo and the other kids, he looked more closely and realized she was the teacher.
As a werewolf, Brooks had excellent vision, but he stepped nearer to the monitor to get a better look at Selena Rosa anyway. Now really wasn’t the time for this, especially considering the danger she was in, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t notice how beautiful she was. Even though she was slender, she had some serious curves beneath the black slacks and red sweater she wore, and while her dark hair was pulled back in a bun, something told him it’d probably reach halfway down her back when it was loose.
But, he thought again, now wasn’t the time. That kid Pablo was half a minute away from pulling the trigger and killing her. The reality of that suddenly had Brooks’s inner wolf howling to get out, and he balled his hands into fists at his side to keep his claws from coming out.
“Brooks, move your team into position,” Gage said, yanking Brooks’s attention away from the monitor and Selena, who was still trying to talk sense into Pablo. “Three of you go through the windows, while the other two take the door.”
“Roger that,” Brooks said.
The principal jumped to her feet, her dark eyes filled with fear. “There has to be another way. Going in there could get those students killed!”
Gage pinned her with a hard look. “And not going in there could get them killed, too. Our goal is to make sure no one ends up that way today.” He looked at Brooks. “Go.”
Brooks was halfway to the door when Zane got to his feet.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. “Those kids along the wall are going to go barmy when the glass starts breaking, and you could use an extra body.”
Brooks threw a quick glance Gage’s way, hoping for Zane’s sake their boss would say yes. But Gage shook his head. “I want you in here on the monitors feeding Brooks and his team details as they go in. They’ll need that more than another body going through the door.”
Zane opened his mouth like he wanted to argue but closed it again. Jaw tight, he nodded and turned back to the TV monitor, but not before Brooks saw the anguish in his dark eyes. The bullet laced with synthetic wolfsbane he’d taken to the arm courtesy of the hunters during the attack a few weeks ago had left him all but disabled, and knowing he couldn’t help the team because of it was ripping Zane’s guts out.
If the regret on Gage’s face was any indication, their alpha was having just as hard a time with Zane’s injury. Unfortunately, it wasn’t likely to get better anytime soon.
But while he felt their pain, Brooks forced himself to compartmentalize it. A teacher and a classroom full of kids were depending on him to do his job. If he didn’t, somebody innocent was going to die, and there was no way in hell he was going to let that happen.
* * *
“Go!”
Brooks shouted the order before the echo of the gunshot from inside the classroom faded. He prayed Trey and the other guys on the roof had gotten their ropes in position, or this hostage rescue operation was about to go really bad, really fast. The plan had been to wait for Zane to let them know when Pablo was facing away from the door, because it would give them the element of surprise, but now that was off the table. No matter how much he tried to focus, Brooks couldn’t keep the horrible image of the beautiful dark-haired teacher lying dead on the floor a few feet away out of his mind. A growl slipped from his throat as his fangs extended. Anger he hadn’t experienced since his first change boiled over inside him, threatening to consume him, and he kicked in the door of the classroom so hard, it split down the middle.
He charged into the room, Connor at his heels. To his right, the students were still huddled against the back wall, wide-eyed looks on their faces. Selena stood protectively in front of them, her gaze locked on Pablo as he pointed his gun at her. While she was putting up a good front, Brooks knew she had to be terrified.
The windows on the far side of the room suddenly exploded as Diego, Trey, and Remy rappelled in, hitting the floor in a spray of shattered glass. Trey and Remy rushed toward the students, seeking to get as many of them down on the floor as possible, while Diego trained his weapon on Pablo, shouting for him to drop the gun.
But Pablo’s finger was already squeezing the trigger.
Brooks snarled and launched himself at the teacher. Even as he left his feet, he knew he was too late. The boom as the huge .50 caliber gun went off was overwhelming, drowning out every other sound in the room.
He slammed into Selena, sending her flying through the air. A bullet buzzed past his head as he wrapped his arms around her and held her close, praying he’d be able to roll when they hit the floor, or he’d break every bone in her small, perfect body.
But then a bullet punched him in the lower back, and the pain from it made coordinated movement nearly impossible. The best he could do was twist a little, coming down on his left shoulder and arm instead of directly on top of her, then sliding across the floor and through a row of desks.
