Since finishing the one-on-one interviews, she’d spent hours covering just about every inch of the compound—with Xander’s complete knowledge and permission. She’d skimmed through the rest of the files, then pawed through every storage space and equipment room she could find before coming up here to do a detailed search. Nothing. No drugs or anything indicating that anything inappropriate was going on.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Gage said. “I could go buy some if it’d help. I’ll need a prescription first, though, so it might take a while.”
She turned in his arms, surprised at how relieved she was to see him back safe and sound. She hadn’t even realized she’d been worried. “How’d it go at the mall?”
He stepped back with a heavy sigh, and she immediately missed the warmth of his arms. “Better than I thought it would. There was a teen with a gun holding hostages in a sporting goods store. He was upset that some girl had made fun of him and wanted to kill her and everyone she worked with. It was tense for a while there, but Kendrick finally talked him down. It took almost four hours to convince the kid to walk away.”
Wow
. “I’m glad no one got hurt.”
“Me too.”
She followed Gage into the small kitchen, watching as he rifled through the cabinets. He opened just about every one of them, but came up empty-handed.
“Looking for anything in particular?” she asked.
“Not really. Just had an urge for something.”
“Like what?”
The teasing look he gave her made her pulse skip a beat. “Now I know what I wanted to eat.” He took her hand and pulled her against him with a low, sexy growl. “You.”
His mouth came down on hers with a possessiveness that made her knees go weak. She clutched his shoulders to keep from melting to the floor. How could she go all gooey from a simple kiss?
Because there wasn’t anything simple about it. The kiss was amazing.
“I’ve been thinking about doing that all day,” he rasped.
She smiled. “Good thing I didn’t leave then.”
He chuckled and bent his head to kiss her again, but a loud cough from the top of the stairs made them both freeze. Damn, she’d completely forgotten where they were. Apparently, so had Gage. He stepped away from her.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sergeant,” Mike said. “But we have another one.”
***
Mac sat in the operations vehicle, her eyes glued to the monitors as Gage and the entire SWAT team finished their sweep of the first floor of the fleabag motel and headed up the stairs at both ends of the building. Despite being worried to death about what came next, she was glad they were finally done with the ground floor because what she’d seen there was going to haunt her for a very long time.
From what Mac had been able to piece together, a local gang had been having some kind of initiation party on the first floor when a rival gang had shown up and started shooting. Gang Number One had returned fire and what had started out as a party had quickly turned into a bloodbath.
The cops had gotten there in time to force the gun-wielding survivors of both gangs up to the second floor of the motel, where they’d barricaded themselves in several rooms. Unfortunately, each gang had taken the people staying at the motel hostage, and were ready to kill all of them—if they hadn’t already.
When she, Gage, and the rest of the SWAT team had arrived, the uniformed officers were still trading fire with the gangs on the second floor. It had been like a warzone, with the gangs taking shots at each other as well as the cops and anyone else who came within sight of the motel.
After making her promise to stay in the operations vehicle parked four blocks away, Gage and the rest of the SWAT team immediately headed into the fray—not to take out the thugs, but to try to rescue any of the hotel guests still inside. She’d almost turned off the monitors when she’d seen all the carnage there. Any remaining thought that the SWAT team was crooked, dirty, or anything other than the biggest bunch of heroic, dedicated cops she’d ever seen in her life was gone now. Gage and his men had gone into the motel over and over, carrying out the wounded while being shot at the whole time.
Mac held her breath as Gage reached the second floor. The two gangs had knocked out windows and piled up furniture to barricade themselves behind while they used up what seemed like an unlimited supply of ammunition. She knew Gage and his team were good at their jobs, but she didn’t see how this was going to end well.
Her hands were freaking shaking, she was so scared. Gage was going in there, and she suddenly realized she didn’t want him to.
The audio system in the operations vehicle was tied into the headsets every SWAT officer wore, so why the hell couldn’t she hear anything? She darted from one monitor to the next, but the men moved so fast it was making her dizzy. She wasn’t even sure where everyone was. A minute ago, Gage had been on the stairwell, but now he looked as if he was on some kind of gravel surface. Where the hell was he, on the ground behind the building? That made no sense at all.
Several men suddenly kneeled down in front of Gage’s camera, and she had only a second to identify one of them as Cooper before they scattered again. She almost screamed in frustration.
Gage’s voice came over the speaker. “Three…two…one…go!”
There was a thunderous boom and a flash of light, then…chaos.
Mac’s heart pounded harder, almost drowning out the sound coming over the speakers. What the hell good were cameras if everything on the monitors was too fast and jarring to comprehend? There were bright flashes of light, then the pop of gunshots followed by the ear-shattering cacophony of automatic weapons being fired. Screams and shouts turned into cries of pain, but they were barely audible over the low, angry growls the SWAT team made. She’d heard the same thing when Mike and Xander had led their squads into the pitch-black office building that first day. Only this time, it was much louder.
She closed her eyes, unable to look at the monitors any longer. Why the hell was she so terrified? She’d been in situations like this before. Heck she’d been shot at half a dozen times in the course of her career and even been near an explosion once. But she’d never been this scared.
Because she wasn’t the one in danger. The man she cared about was. And that made it worse. She prayed Gage and his men made it through this safely.
Mac didn’t know how long she sat there with her eyes closed. But when she opened them again, an eerie kind of quiet had descended upon the motel. She could still hear moans, whimpers, and the occasional sob, but no gunfire.
Then Mike’s voice came over the speaker. “One clear.”
“Two clear,” said Xander.
“Three clear,” reported Cooper.
The SWAT team was calling in by some kind of number pattern, letting Gage and everyone else know they were alive and that their area of responsibility had been cleared. She held her breath as fifteen numbers were announced.
“All clear,” Gage said. “Get the EMTs in here.”
Mac slumped down in the seat, more exhausted than if she’d run a marathon.
Behind her, the doors of the operations vehicle opened. She jerked around to see Zak stick in his head.
“Everyone’s running inside. What happened?”
Mac had completely forgotten Zak had been outside taking pictures of the scene. “I’m not sure, but I think everyone’s okay,” she said. “I heard all of them over the radio at least, and they sounded okay. I don’t have a clue what happened, though.”
Zak climbed in the truck and shut the door. “I think they blew their way in through the roof, both ends of the building at exactly the same time. There was gravel and flaming tar flying everywhere.”
That explained the gravel she’d seen. They’d been on the roof.
She and Zak sat in silence, watching the monitors and trying to figure out what was going on, but it was too dark and chaotic. A lot of people had gotten hurt in the little gang war, so the monitors were filled with EMTs, uniformed officers, and SWAT team members rendering first aid. The motel looked like a scene out of a
M*A*S*H
episode as an endless stream of ambulance gurneys rolled in and right back out.
She was going to get sick if she kept trying to watch the crazy scene. But she couldn’t tear herself away until she knew Gage was okay. When she finally caught a quick flash of his tall, broad-shouldered form in one of the other men’s cameras, she let out the breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding. He was safe. She could breathe again.
Twenty minutes later, Becker and one of the team’s medics, Senior Corporal Trey Duncan, came out to give them an update.
“Cooper and Nelson—our demo guys—blew entry points through the roof in four different places.” Becker said it so casually, as if they did stuff like this every day. Which she supposed they did. “Then the whole team dropped through, right into the middle of each gang.”
“Are the hostages okay?” Mac asked. “Is everyone okay?”
“Everyone in the unit is fine. A few minor nicks and scratches, but that’s about it.” Duncan frowned. “Some of the hostages are in pretty bad shape, though. At least three were shot before we even went in, and two more were hit during the rescue. The gangbangers seemed pretty intent on taking as many people with them as possible. They’re on the way to the hospital now, but we don’t know if they’re all going make it.”
Mac shook her head.
“Sergeant Dixon asked me to tell you that he’s going to be here for a few more hours,” Becker said. “He thought you might want to call it a night.”
Then he and Duncan left to go back to the motel.
Zak glanced at her after the two cops stepped out of the operations vehicle. “Silly question, but I’m guessing you’re going to stay?”
“Yeah. I want to hang around and make sure they’re all okay.”
He grinned. “I thought so. You gonna need me at the compound tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’ll see you at the paper.”
After Zak left, Mac turned her attention back to the monitors, patiently waiting to catch another glimpse of Gage.
***
Gage was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. All he wanted to do was go home, fall into bed, and pass out for a few hours until the alarm went off and he had to get up and do it all over again. But Mackenzie insisted he needed to eat, and kept telling him that until he stopped at the next fast-food drive-through they came to.
“Don’t stare at the burrito,” she scolded gently. “Eat it.”
He forced himself to take a bite, closing his eyes for a moment as the spicy beef filling hit his tongue. Maybe he wasn’t too tired to eat after all. Next to him, Mackenzie bit into her own burrito.
Gage had been surprised to find her waiting for him when he’d climbed into the operations vehicle. He thought she’d left hours ago. But she told him she’d wanted to wait. It might be selfish, but he was glad she had. Seeing her beautiful face after the long-ass day he’d had made him feel a little less exhausted.
The two incidents he’d gone on weren’t the only reason he was dragging. The other was the argument he’d gotten into with his pack that morning after PT. He’d thought that after yesterday, his guys wouldn’t mind sitting down with Mackenzie for a one-on-one interview, but they’d been flat-out pissed off at the idea.
“That’s too damn bad because you’re doing it anyway,” he’d told them. “If it’s any consolation, you won’t have to put up with Ms. Stone snooping around much longer.”
“How do you know that?” McCall asked.
“Yeah.” Kendrick’s eyes narrowed. “Just how involved with this reporter are you? Is there something going on that you haven’t told us?”
Gage bit back a snarl. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Cooper looked up from the graphic novel he was thumbing through. “He means, are you sleeping with her?”
Gage had been so shocked he’d just stood there staring at his explosives expert like a damn pig with a Rolex.
“Well, are you?” Cooper demanded.
Gage had to clench his hands into fists to keep from slugging the man. Getting into a brawl with Cooper might be satisfying as hell, but it would only confirm what he and the rest of the men feared—that he was letting his attraction to Mackenzie cloud his judgment and it was putting the Pack at risk. He understood where their concern was coming from, even if it was misplaced.
“No,” he said as evenly as he could manage. “We’re not sleeping together.”
“Bullshit,” Xander snarled. “We can smell her all over you.”
Gage didn’t even realize he’d moved toward his senior squad leader until Mike stepped in front of him and put a hand on his chest.
Brooks moved to stand next to Xander. “Sergeant, how do we know she isn’t playing you?”
“She’s not playing me,” he growled.
“How can you be sure?” Mike asked.
“I just know, damn it!” he snapped.
That probably wouldn’t be good enough for them, but he didn’t know how to put it into words. Mackenzie might have come here looking for a story that first day, but something in his gut told him that wasn’t the reason she kept coming back.
Xander swore under his breath. “It’s not just about her finding out about us, Gage. Having her around is dangerous.”
Gage frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“For one thing, you’re not thinking clearly,” Xander said. “Hardy sent his goons to rough you up and you don’t seem to give a damn.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
“Yeah? Well, you haven’t mentioned what you’re going to do about it.” Xander shook his head. “Anyway, it’s not just that. She’s putting off pheromones all of us are picking up, and it’s affecting some of the younger wolves. To say it’s a distraction is an understatement. It’s going to get someone killed.”
That’s when things had gotten really ugly. Not everyone in the Pack agreed with Xander, and the guys had taken sides. And the ones who went against Gage weren’t only pissed about Mackenzie, they were calling him out as Pack leader. There’d been a few stare downs over the years, but it’d never gone further than that, and certainly never with any of the more senior werewolves. But this fight was going to make the scuffle in the weight room the other day look like child’s play. Blood would definitely be shed.