by Paige Tyler
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.
Chapter 17
With the power knocked out from the storm, it was as dark in her mother’s shop as it was outside, but Triana barely noticed. She was simply too exhausted, physically and mentally, to care by the time they finally got home. She wasn’t sure what she thought about having Remy and his SWAT teammates there, even if they had saved her life and her mother’s. She felt horrible for even thinking like that, but she was so confused by everything she’d seen and needed time to figure it all out.
Not that how she felt seemed to matter at the moment, since not only had Remy refused to leave them on their own, but her mother had also firmly stated she wouldn’t stand for any of the men driving back to their hotel at that time of night, not with the way the wind and rain was kicking up right then.
So the guys stayed downstairs in the shop, making sure the windows weren’t going to blow in and water wasn’t going to come rushing under the door, while Triana went upstairs with her mother, hoping to get her head around everything.
She sat at the kitchen table while her mom bustled around the kitchen, heating up soup on the gas stove and getting all the flashlights and emergency lamps out. Triana had no idea how her mother did it. The events a
t Lee’s house had drained her like a battery. She couldn’t even put in the effort to change out of her wet clothes.
Half of her exhaustion came from all the questions the police had asked her after the shooting had stopped. Triana was a little surprised the cops had even shown up, considering the storm was so bad, but she supposed a shoot-out involving automatic weapons didn’t happen every day in Kenner, so police, detectives, and politicians had come out of the woodwork.
Following her mother’s suggestions, she’d kept her statements brief and vague. Quinn had lured her to a warehouse in the Marigny by saying he had information relating to her father’s murder. When she’d gotten there, she’d seen Quinn shoot another man; then, Quinn had knocked her unconscious and taken her to Lee’s home. Lee and Quinn had confessed to arranging the murder of her father because he refused to sell drugs through his club. Lee had lured her mother to his home to clean up any loose ends; then, the SWAT officers had stormed the place and rescued her.
She stayed away from any mention of werewolves or questions that veered outside the boundaries of her narrow story line. Of course, those were the questions the Kenner PD were most interested in. Why had Quinn told her about her father’s murder? Why had a team from New Orleans and Dallas SWAT come to her rescue? Where were Lee and Quinn now? Why were the men in custody claiming they’d been attacked by glowing-eyed monsters?
Triana’s answer to those questions and all the others just as impossible to explain was a plain and simple “I don’t know.”
She didn’t realize she’d been sitting at the table that long, but the next thing Triana knew, her mother set a big bowl of steaming soup in front of her, with a ham and cheese sandwich on the side. She didn’t feel like eating anything, but her mom shoved the bowl toward her and pointed at it.
“Eat.”
Her mother set a battery-powered lamp on the table between them, then sat across from her and began eating. “I’m guessing you have a lot of questions about everything you learned and saw today.”
Triana dipped her spoon in her soup, then took her time nibbling on her sandwich as she tried to figure out where to start. It wasn’t like she had to worry that her mother hadn’t seen what Remy and the others were. According to the guards at the front who’d been arrested, the SWAT cops had tackled cars and thrown men through the air like they were horseshoes.
“Lee and Quinn said some really crazy stuff about Dad,” she finally said. “I thought they were off their rockers, but then I saw…things…inside the house when Remy and his friends came to get me. Things I can’t explain.”
Her mother set down her sandwich and regarded Triana for a moment. “Finding out werewolves are real can be a shock for most people.”
Triana wanted to tell her that she was talking crazy, that werewolves weren’t real, that there was some other explanation. But she knew the time for doubt was over. Even though she was a scientist who liked her feet firmly planted in fact, she knew what she’d seen.
“So Dad was a werewolf?”
Triana couldn’t believe those words had just come out of her mouth. If anyone at the crime lab back in Houston heard her, they’d have tied her up in her own lab coat.
Her mother gave her a small smile. “Yes. In fact, it’s how we met.”
Triana couldn’t even begin to make sense of that statement, but since she’d already climbed fully aboard the crazy train, she figured she might as well find a seat and get comfortable.
“What did his being a werewolf have to do with you guys getting together?”
“You remember that your grandma ran the shop before you were born, right?” her mother asked. At Triana’s nod, she continued. “Well, your grandma had a reputation for helping a lot of unusual people in her day. As she got older, she passed that responsibility on to me. When people stopped by looking for help, I did anything I could to help them. Your father was one of those people.”
“Dad came to you for help because he was a werewolf?” Triana asked.
She was a little surprised at that. Her father had always been a man who liked doing things on his own.
“Yes,” her mom said. “But not quite in the way you think. You see, there are three kinds of werewolves—alphas, betas, and omegas. Your father was an omega, meaning he had some anger management issues. When he got mad, his inner wolf would come out, and he was worried that sooner or later, someone would get hurt. He lived in fear of that happening, so he came to the shop looking for something to help him stay in control.”
Realization dawned on Triana. “The necklace!”
Her mother nodded. “Exactly. The wolf pendant was a charm designed to ward off negative energies and reinforce positive energy.”
“Did it work?”
Her mom tried not to look too smug. “I admit, it was one of my more inspired pieces. But while it was very powerful, I prefer to believe it was your father’s love for you and me that kept him stable. After all, love is by far the most powerful force in the universe.”
Triana dipped her spoon into her soup again. Clearly, the world was a far more complicated place than she had ever imagined. “Why didn’t you or Dad ever tell me any of these things?”
“Why?” Her mother smiled gently. “Because you were always much happier studying your own particular form of magic. We felt no need to confuse you with ours.”
Triana supposed she could understand that. She’d always been into science and had never bought into the voodoo stuff her mother did. She probably would have thought her parents were crazy if they tried to tell her about werewolves. Still, she couldn’t help feeling saddened by that fact. While it was strange trying to reconcile the sweet, kind man she knew with the savage ferocity she’d witnessed that night, it felt like there was a part of her father she’d missed getting to know.
Triana went back to her soup and sandwich, partly because she wanted to eat while it was still hot, but mostly because she needed time to think about what she wanted to ask her mom next. Her first instinct was to ask if her mom had known Remy was a werewolf before tonight, but she pushed that aside until later. The whole subject of Remy was too painful to get into right then.
“Quinn implied Lee and Dad used to be friends,” Triana finally said. “Is that true?”
Her mother sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. When I met your father, he was Lee’s enforcer. Since he was an omega werewolf, he was very good at his job. To some degree, your father was the brawn responsible for building most of Lee’s empire. But when he met me, that changed. I told him if he wanted to be with me, he couldn’t be in that life anymore.”
Triana smiled. She could definitely see her mom laying down the law like that. “How did Dad handle the ultimatum?”
“Better than I expected,” her mother admitted. “But only because he loved me so much. When you came along, it reinforced the importance of what he was doing.” Her lips curved. “The moment your father saw you for the first time, his entire world flipped upside down. He bought the club, settled down, and became an even better husband and a tremendous father. I was aware he still did an odd job for Lee on the side now and then out of some misplaced loyalty to the man, but by and large, he stayed on the straight and narrow.”
Triana’s heart ached at the memory of her father and how much she missed him right then. “Lee said he hired some people he called hunters to murder Dad because he wouldn’t sell drugs out of the club.”
Her mother closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, they were wet with tears. “I’m sure that was the excuse he used to justify what he did. But in reality, I don’t think Lee could ever forgive your father for walking away from him and leaving him weaker.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds in the dark room the clink of their spoons against the bowls and the low, deep voices of Remy and his friends drifting up the stairs. Finishing her soup, Triana pushed the bowl awa
y and took a bite of the sandwich, chewing slowly. Finally, unable to contain her curiosity any longer, she tackled the big pink elephant in the room.
“So, Remy and his friends…” she whispered, half-afraid they’d hear her. “They’re like Dad, aren’t they?”
Her mother laughed as she finished the last of her soup. “Don’t bother to whisper, dear. Werewolves have incredible hearing. If they’ve been paying attention, they’ve heard every word we’ve said.”
Triana blinked. Of course they had incredible hearing. Why not? She glanced over at the kitchen counter where she’d cut her finger the other night—right before she’d asked Remy if he was up for a quickie. Had the other guys heard them? She blushed even as she wondered what other abilities they had.
“Yes, Remy and his friends are werewolves like your father,” her mom said, bringing her attention back to their conversation. “Though technically, they’re a little different because all four of them are alphas, the more dominant kind of werewolf. They’re strong, heroic, and tend to attract a lot of attention everywhere they go. I haven’t met enough alphas to know for sure, but something tells me they’re all hunks too.”
Triana laughed despite herself. Remy was definitely that. But then an image of claws and fangs flashed in her head, and she shuddered. Things between her and Remy had been falling apart before she’d learned he was a werewolf. She doubted learning something like this was going to help their chances of working anything out. The thought made her stomach churn as if it wanted to reject the soup and sandwich she’d just eaten.
Her mother reached across the table and took Triana’s hand in hers. “Hon, I know this is none of my business, so if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand. But I’m a little confused about what’s going on between you and Remy. A few days ago you were talking about falling for him, and now you’re sitting up here in the dark with me while the courageous man who saved your life is trapped in exile downstairs. What happened?”
