Hungry Like the Wolf(91)

“I’m the only family he has,” Mac said.

“Then you might want to come quickly.”

Mac clutched the phone to her chest. “It’s Zak,” she told the three werewolves. “Someone beat him up. I have to go to the hospital.”

She jumped to her feet, but Cooper caught her arm. “Hang on. Let me call back and make sure Zak’s really there. Which hospital?”

Crap. Cooper thought it might be a trap. She hadn’t even considered that. “Mercy General. The nurse said he was in ICU.”

Mac listened impatiently as Cooper identified himself and gave his badge number to whoever answered the phone. The look on his face told her all she needed to know.

“He’s there, and he’s in bad shape,” Cooper told her when he hung up. “Come on. We’ll drive you.”

Fifteen minutes later, Brooks pulled the SUV up to the emergency entrance. Mac would have jumped out right away, but Cooper stopped her.

“Wait until Becker gives the all clear.”

Becker got out and scanned the surrounding area, then nodded.

Mac was out of the car and running toward the building when she heard gunshots—a lot of gunshots. She whirled around to see Cooper and Becker falling to the ground, blood staining their uniform shirts. More gunfire echoed as whoever was shooting riddled the SUV with bullets.

Mac froze for a moment, then sprinted toward the downed SWAT officers. But she didn’t make it more than a few steps before someone grabbed her and dragged her across the parking lot to a four-door sedan that squealed to a stop.

When the guy tossed her in the back, she immediately lunged for the opposite door, but a second man jumped in, trapping her. The man who’d first grabbed her shoved her back against the seat as the driver punched the gas.

“Yeah, boss, we have her,” the man in the front passenger seat said, turning to give her a smirk.

Roscoe Patterson. Mac would recognize that smug face of his anywhere—even with bruises covering half of it. There was a soft cast on his right wrist, too. She wondered who had beaten him up.

“She ran straight to the hospital, just like you said,” Patterson continued. “We put down three of those fucking SWAT assholes, too. Told you there was no reason to bring outsiders in to deal with this. We’ll be at the hangar in thirty minutes.”

Mac swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure how badly Cooper and Becker had been hit, but Hardy’s thugs must have put a couple hundred rounds into the SUV. There was no way Brooks had made it through unscathed. Gage had told her werewolves weren’t immortal. Could Hardy’s men have killed them? Tears stung her eyes. She didn’t even want to think about that.

“What are you going to do to me?” Mac asked.

Patterson ignored her as he said something into a handheld radio. Since he kept looking in the side mirror, he must have been talking to someone in a car behind them. She was right. A moment later, another sedan passed them and took the lead.

Patterson gave her a nasty smile. “Honestly, I don’t know what Mr. Hardy has in store for you. But considering that your boyfriend is responsible for the destruction of his entire business empire, killed his son, then had the balls to walk in and threaten him in his own home, I assume it’s going to be something very painful. I really wouldn’t want to be you when the boss gets his hands on you.”

Mac didn’t have a clue what the man meant about Gage threatening Hardy in his own home. But if Hardy had gone to the effort of grabbing her alive, it meant he had something specific in mind for her. If he’d wanted her dead, his men would have gunned her down like Cooper, Becker, and Brooks.

They must have been the ones who’d beat up Zak and used him as bait to draw her out of the compound. She had no idea how Hardy could have known about her relationship with Zak and that it was one thing that would pull her out of hiding, but somehow he had.

Mac saw a blur of movement out of the corner of her eye. Up ahead in the darkness, something big slammed into the side of the car in front of them, sending it spinning out of control. The driver of the car Mac was in swerved, barely avoiding it, then slowed to a stop.

“Shit,” muttered the guy beside her. “That was a freaking man who hit them.”

“No way,” Patterson said, turning to look over his shoulder at the other car that was now thirty feet behind them.

“I know what I saw,” the other man insisted. “It was a man. He hit them like he was tackling the damn car.”

Mac had seen it, too, but she wasn’t going to clarify that the man they’d seen wasn’t really a man at all. She didn’t know how it was possible, but Brooks had survived the ambush and chased down two speeding cars to rescue her. She hadn’t realized a werewolf could do that. Then again, she didn’t really know what a werewolf was capable of.