by Paige Tyler
She was busy examining the photos for the missing night vision goggles when something else caught her attention.
She pointed at Diego Martinez’s right hand. “What does that look like to you?”
Zak leaned close to the computer screen. “What the hell?” He fiddled with the keyboard, zooming in on Martinez’s hand. “It looks like blood.”
“That’s what I thought.” She turned to look out the window at the big operations vehicle just in time to see Martinez and Delaney climbing into the cab. Was Martinez holding his arm a little funny?
“Did we just see an injured police officer drive off when there are half a dozen EMTs who could have looked at him?” Zak asked.
“I think we did.”
“Why the hell would they do that?”
“I don’t know…yet.”
But she was damn sure going to find out. She had a sneaking suspicion it was because Martinez was worried about whatever drug he was on showing up in his blood. If she was right, then there really was a story here.
***
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“I’m sure,” Gage said. “Martinez was barely scratched by that bullet. He can get patched up at the compound.”
Xander swore. “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”
Gage waited until the news van drove away before he turned to his senior squad leader. He knew Xander wasn’t worried about the minor graze wound Martinez had sustained during the entry. It was almost closed up already and would barely leave a scar if they took care of it right. But Xander definitely wasn’t too thrilled at the idea of having a reporter—a woman reporter at that—sticking her nose in their business. Gage hadn’t expected him to be. Xander didn’t like outsiders in general, and female outsiders in particular. In his opinion, both were bad for the Pack. And if something was bad for the Pack, Xander was never shy about letting him know it.
Gage glanced at his other squad leader. “What do you think, Mike?”
The big man shrugged. “I gotta agree with Xander on this one, Gage. You know Mackenzie Stone has a reputation for digging pretty hard to get the story she’s after, right?”
Gage went out of his way to let his two assistant squad leaders have a say in how the team did things. But when you lead a group of alphas the way he did, it wasn’t possible for everyone to agree on everything all the time. And that’s when he had to pull rank.
“I know all about her reputation,” he said. “She isn’t looking to write a fluff piece on how we do our job. If she’s sniffing, it’s because she thinks there’s a story here. And if she thinks that, she isn’t going to stop looking just because we make it hard on her. If anything, that will only make her dig deeper.”
“So what, we just make it easy for her?” Xander demanded.
“No, we don’t make it easy,” Gage said. “We bring her in and control the flow of information she receives. We show her what we want her to see, when we want her to see it. We make sure she gets the message—and only the message—we want her to get.”
Mike raised his brows. “You honestly think that’ll work? She doesn’t come across as the kind of person you can mislead easily.”
“I’d rather have her where I can keep an eye on her instead of constantly worrying about where she’s going to show up and what she’ll find on her own.”
Mike regarded him thoughtfully. “You sure this is just about keeping an eye on a possible threat?”
Gage pinned him with a hard look. “Meaning?”
Mike didn’t back down. “Meaning, I couldn’t help but notice how nice the inside of the operations truck smelled when we walked in. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say Ms. Stone has a scent our kind might find irresistible. Sure that doesn’t have something to do with your sudden interest in her?”
Gage did his best to keep his face unreadable and his heartbeat steady, but it was damn tough. Mostly because Mike was right. Gage had noticed how good Mackenzie Stone smelled. Her scent was so intoxicating, he’d almost groaned out loud when she stepped into the operations vehicle. It wasn’t some expensive perfume she’d been wearing, either. Just good old-fashioned, feminine pheromones. Luckily, he wasn’t ruled by his nose—or other parts of his anatomy—when it came to making decisions. Especially decisions about the Pack.
He knew the threat Mackenzie Stone presented. He’d been on guard from the moment he’d spotted her at the compound in her undercover news van two days ago. Hell, he’d been on alert ever since the public relations department told him she wanted to do a story on SWAT. He’d turned down her request for an in-depth interview and ride-along, hoping she’d take the hint. He should have known better. After the stunt she pulled today, he figured the only way to get rid of her was to give her the interview she wanted.
“I make decisions about pack affairs with the head above my shoulders, not the one below my belt,” he said to Mike. “If I think it’s a good idea we keep Ms. Stone close, it’s because it’s best for the Pack, not because she smells good.”
Mike shrugged. “Just checking. If you’re not interested in her that way, maybe I’ll look at her Facebook page—see if she’s available.”
Mike might have sounded casual, but he was still testing him. He wanted to know if Mackenzie’s pheromones were making Gage think with his dick instead of his head.
“You could do that,” Gage said. “But I wouldn’t if I were you.”
Mike tensed, as if bracing for a fight. Beside him, Xander did the same.
“Why’s that?” Mike asked.
“Because I don’t think she’s that into you,” Gage told him. “I mean, you’re not very attractive and you sweat…a lot. Women find that gross.”
Mike stared at him, speechless for once.
Xander laughed and slapped Mike on the shoulder. “Dude, I’ve told you that sweating thing was going to ruin your love life. Now even the boss man has noticed. You need to get that looked at.”
Mike scowled at him, his brows drawing together to make his already chiseled features look extra fierce. “I don’t have a sweating problem, you jackass. I’m wearing thirty-five pounds of Kevlar on a hot Texas day. Of course I’m going to sweat.”
“I’m not sweating,” Xander pointed out.
“That’s because you haven’t hit puberty yet,” Mike retorted. “But just wait, in another year or two, it will happen—I promise.”
Gage chuckled as his squad leaders unloaded their weapons and put away their gear. Another tense situation defused—and he didn’t mean the one with the hostages. Keeping his pack of alpha werewolves under control was just as much a part of his job as figuring out when to green-light an operation or determining the best way to enter a building full of armed thugs. In some ways it was the toughest part of the job. Because nobody wanted to have a bunch of out-of-control SWAT types running around town, especially when they also happened to be werewolves.
Yeah, they were a pain in the ass sometimes. But at the end of the day, they were his pack and he wouldn’t want it any other way.
***
“What the hell’s going on, Vince?” Gage asked as the Internal Affairs officer ran down the same list of questions for the third time.
After dropping Mike off at the compound, he and Xander had come to police headquarters for what was supposed to be a quick debriefing on what had obviously been a clean shooting. But they had already been here for almost two hours.
The gray-haired man looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Just being thorough, Gage.”
That was a crock of shit. It was standard procedure in an officer-involved shooting to talk to both the cop who’d done the shooting and his supervisor on the scene, but if this was just about being thorough, Internal Affairs wouldn’t have put him and Xander in separate rooms for questioning.
“You already have a statement from the woman Xander saved,” Gage pointed out. “She corroborated what he said—that the gunman was in the process of pulling the tr
igger on her. According to the other hostages in the E-Brand building and the employees at the bank they robbed, the guy had been coked up to all hell. Even his own crew admitted he hadn’t been in control. How much more thorough do you need to be?”
“Just work with me on this, okay?” Vince sighed. “Trust me. We have our reasons.”
Trust and Internal Affairs normally didn’t go together, but it wasn’t as if Gage had much of a choice. Unless he wanted to call in a union rep and really make a mess of this situation. Which he didn’t.
So, Gage leaned back in his chair and answered Vince Coletti’s questions again. God, he hoped Xander was keeping his cool in the other room. His senior squad leader was smart and had been in these shooting reviews before, so he knew what to say—and more importantly, what not to say. If the questioning seemed like it was heading in a bad direction, he was savvy enough to ask for his union rep. But Xander also had a short fuse sometimes. If IA got in his face, he might tell them to pound sand.
“Okay, I think we’re good,” Vince said after the fourth rehash of his story. “We’re going to need to talk to Corporal Riggs for a little while longer, though.”
Gage stared at the man. “Seriously?”
Vince gave him what was probably supposed to be a placating smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll have patrol give him a ride out to the compound.”
Which was IA’s way of saying he didn’t want Gage hanging around because it was going to take a hell of a lot longer than a little while. But getting into it with Coletti wasn’t going to help. While he might be more than ready to rip someone in half right now, Gage reined in his inner wolf. He jerked open the door and stormed out of the interrogation room, almost running over his boss, Deputy Chief Hal Mason. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Hal had been waiting for him.
“Why the hell is IA grilling my senior corporal?” Gage demanded.
Hal waited until Vince had gone into the room where they were questioning Xander before answering. “IA is just doing their due diligence on this shooting, that’s all. They aren’t trying to screw Corporal Riggs, you have my word on that.”
Gage snorted. “You could have fooled me.”
The way his boss was looking at him made Gage think Hal wasn’t telling him everything, but the deputy chief only sighed. “Go back to work. I’ll make sure Riggs gets a ride out to the compound when IA’s done with him.”
Gage hated the idea of leaving Xander with IA, but Coletti could have him in interrogation the rest of the day, and he still had to tell the Pack about Mackenzie Stone—who’d be at the compound in a little over an hour.
Shit.
“Tell Xander I’ll see him back at the compound.”
Hal nodded. “I will. And Gage? Good job out there today.”
Gage grunted.
Luckily, there was no sign of Mackenzie Stone’s news van in the lot when Gage arrived at the compound. He parked the SUV, then went around to the training building, figuring that’s where everyone would probably be.
He heard the sounds of growling before he even opened the door. Officers Landry Cooper and Eric Becker were sprawled on the couch in the dayroom watching TV and eating popcorn.
“What the hell’s going on back there?” Gage demanded, jerking his head toward the rear of the building.
Cooper, the team’s explosives expert and coincidentally—or maybe not so coincidentally—the most laid-back, in-control member of the Pack, shrugged. “Martinez and Delaney came back a little fired up from today’s action,” he said in his southern drawl. “They got into an argument with some of the other guys and now they’re just working it out.”
Which was code for going at each other like a couple of MMA fighters.
Gage swore. Sometimes he felt more like a damn school teacher than the commander of a team of highly trained police officers. “And Mike didn’t think it was necessary to break it up before they destroyed something expensive?”
Cooper grabbed a handful of popcorn from the big bowl Becker was holding. “Domestic abuse call came in about an hour ago. Mike took Duncan and Boudreaux with him.”
“Didn’t you consider that maybe you should step in and do something?” Gage all but snarled.
Cooper didn’t take his eyes off the TV show he was watching—a damn G.I. Joe cartoon, for crying out loud. “Not my argument.”
And sometimes it felt like he was in charge of a day care center—for out of control werewolves.
Gage didn’t waste his breath asking Becker why he didn’t do anything. The surveillance expert was one of the newest members of the team. He might be as big and tough as anyone in the unit, but they weren’t going to pay attention to anything he said. Besides, Gage didn’t think he could pry the tech and electronics experts away from their tub of popcorn.
He headed toward the back of the building, wincing at a particularly loud thud. There was always a little roughhousing after a mission. It was how werewolves dealt with stress. But usually he, Xander, or Mike were around to keep things from getting out of hand. And when you had sixteen oversized alpha wolves in one pack, things could get out of hand pretty damn quick.
He noticed a couple broken chairs and a crushed desk as he passed the classroom. The disagreement must have started there, then moved to the back of the building where the weight room and gym were. He hoped they were in the gym instead of the weight room—not only was there less stuff they could break, but there were also fewer things they could use as weapons.
But while three members of the team—Senior Corporal Zane Kendrick, Senior Corporal Trevor McCall, and Officer Alex Trevino—were in the gym tossing around a basketball, they weren’t the source of the racket he’d heard.
His nose confirmed the identity of the men in the weight room before he got there. All six remaining members of the team were in the weight room. Damn it.
On the bright side, only four of the men were fighting. Two of them—Senior Corporals Jayden Brooks and Carter Nelson—were doing their best to keep the other cops from grabbing anything they could use as weapons while at the same time working just as hard to keep them from destroying the workout equipment.
They were only marginally successful at both tasks.
Gage ducked to avoid a forty-five-pound weight someone threw across the room. It smashed against the wall of mirrors on the far side of the room, completely shattering the floor-to-ceiling piece of glass. Shit, he’d paid for those out of his own pocket.
A low rumble erupted from his lips. This was the reason alpha wolves rarely ever got together in a group—it was damn near impossible to keep them from fighting. But when he’d taken over the SWAT unit eight years ago, he’d made the decision to seek out the best cops in the country and get them on his team. If that meant bringing in other werewolves, that was what he did.
But days like today made him wonder if it was worth it.
Martinez and Delaney had squared off against Connor Malone and the newest member of the team, Max Lowry. Their claws were out, their canines were extended, and their eyes gleamed gold. All they’d done so far was slash each other up, but their faces and jaws were changing shape even now, which meant bites would be coming next, and they were much tougher to recover from. Worse, Malone’s back was already starting to bunch up in that way it did before a full shift. And if Malone shifted into his two-hundred-and-forty-pound wolf form, someone was probably going to get killed.
Gage let out a deep growl and waded into the midst of the brawl, letting his fangs slide out in a partial shift as he started laying backhanded swings that sent people flying. The moment he had them separated, he grabbed Malone by the shoulders and yanked him off his feet, then slammed him against the remaining mirror hard enough to shatter it like the others. Then he bared his teeth and let loose a snarl loud enough to be heard well outside the compound. He didn’t care who heard—he wanted their full attention and he wanted it now.
Malone immediately relaxed in his grip while Martinez, Delaney, and Lowry took a few ste
ps back.
Gage held on to his lead sniper until the man had completely shed any vestige of his wolf form. By the time he turned to look at the other three, they had shifted back, too. There was no evidence of the werewolves they’d been—except for the bloody claw marks covering their bodies and shredding their uniforms. Gage didn’t shift back. He wanted them to get a good look at his yellow-gold eyes and gleaming fangs.
“What the hell is wrong with the four of you?” he demanded. “I walk in here expecting to find a team of professional cops, and instead I find you acting like a bunch of freaking out-of-control Chihuahuas.” He pointedly looked around the room at the broken mirrors, crushed weight benches, and torn mats. “We paid to renovate this weight room out of our own pockets and you’ve wrecked it with your bullshit. Somebody here better start talking fast or I’m going to give in to my first instinct and have you all transferred to bicycle patrol handing out parking tickets downtown.”
“They started it, Sarg.” To his credit, Delaney actually looked a little chagrinned at all the damage they’d done. “Martinez and I were talking about him getting shot in the arm, and Lowry said it happened because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”
Gage stared menacingly at Delaney. “The four of you tore up pack property because the new guy was trying to get under your skin?”
“That’s not the way it went down, Sarg,” Lowry protested.
“No?” Gage hoped like hell this new pup wasn’t about to say something that was going to get him buried. “So, how did it go down? Please tell me.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Gage saw Brooks and Nelson exchange a worried look. Like they thought he might snap someone’s neck. He’d be lying if he said the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. He’d never do it, of course.
Unfortunately, these kinds of brawls happened a lot. Regardless of the formal rank structure placed on them by the Dallas PD, his wolves were constantly challenging the pecking order within the Pack as each cop tried to outperform the other and each squad tried to make its group look better. With all the new guys he’d brought in over the years, he shouldn’t be surprised the issue had come to a head again. Well, he was going to nip this competition shit in the bud right now. His team would be one, well-oiled unit, or he’d tear it down and start over.
