Wolf Untamed (SWAT - Special Wolf Alpha Team #11) - Paige Tyler Page 0,3

support column. He moved the beam of his flashlight back and forth around the space ahead of him, but other than a lot of bare shelves and crushed cardboard boxes, there wasn’t much to see. Then he caught sight of a doorway on the far side of the wide-open area and realized this store was connected to the one next to it. He cursed his luck. He’d hoped this strip mall was composed of individual units.

He cautiously made his way across the room, trying to see behind every support column, shelf, box, and dark corner all at the same time. That was damn near impossible to do on his own. Dammit, he should have waited for backup. Other units called out their location over the radio, but they were all a good distance away. He prayed one of them was a K9 team. What he wouldn’t give to be able to see in the dark like one of his four-legged coworkers. And being able to smell like a K9? Crap, that would be awesome.

He couldn’t see in the dark—or sniff out bad guys—and he never would. But he was going to risk his life to find those girls anyway…if they were in here.

Diego stepped through the second doorway into the next store to find it even darker and more cluttered than the first. He was slowly weaving his way through the mess when he heard a gunshot immediately followed by a woman’s scream.

Shit.

He thumbed the mic on his radio. “Shots fired. I repeat, shots fired.”

Then he was moving, less concerned about checking every dark space and more concerned about getting to the woman. Running through one store after the other without thought to the fact that there might be a bad guy waiting to shoot him was reckless and stupid. But when someone was in trouble, helping them was the only thing his head would let him do. It was the way he was wired.

Diego let his instincts guide him as he worked his way through the confusing twists and turns of the shops, running all the way to the far end of the interconnected strip mall without seeing anyone.

Where the hell is she?

He turned to retrace his steps when he heard a soft whimper, so quiet he barely made it out over the thud of his own heart. Sure it came from somewhere to his left, he headed in that direction, keeping his flashlight and weapon pointed forward as he slipped around a metal storage rack.

Three dark-haired women huddled on the floor behind it, holding on to one another as tears ran down their faces. None of them could have been more than twenty-five years old, but the one in the middle looked a hell of a lot younger than that as she lay between them, blood soaking through the white blouse she wore and the yellow rain slicker she had on over that. In the glow of his flashlight, he could see she was in pain and pale as death. Crap, she was almost certainly bleeding out. Even as he watched, her eyes fluttered open and closed as she fought off her body’s attempt to pass out.

He hurried over, dropping to a knee beside them. Still holding onto the flashlight, he reached out and gently pulled back the edge of the injured girl’s raincoat to check the bullet wound in her stomach. Oh, shit, it looked bad. If she didn’t get help soon, she was done for. Thumbing his radio, he requested EMS with air evac.

“Officer Martinez,” he said, quickly introducing himself to the trio of women. “Where are the people who did this?”

The woman on the left shook her head, gray eyes darting left and right like a terrified rabbit. “We ran in here to get away from them, but they found us. They’ve been messing with us for the last ten minutes, saying all kinds of psycho stuff they were going to do to us.”

“We tried to hide, but one of the guys found us,” the other woman added. She had pink streaks in her straight hair and a diamond stud in her nose. “He didn’t even say anything. He just walked up and shot Tina, then took off. Maybe they left when they heard you come in.”

Diego hoped she was right, but his gut told him there was no chance the men had left. More likely, they were hiding somewhere, waiting to make their move. Hell, they might be close enough to hear him and