Page 1 of Fighting for Lucy

CHAPTER ONE

January 21st

10:43 A.M.

“What's happening?”Lucy Elrod demanded.

The plane was making a horrible sound, and an alarm was blaring, screaming at them that something was wrong.

“We’re going down,” the pilot said. Considering what he’d just told her and the kind of wailing sound coming from the engine, he should not have said those words with such a steady calm.

The man didn't even look the teeniest little bit panicked while terror was clawing at her insides with a viciousness she hadn't felt in a long time.

It wasn’t so much their likely impending death that had her hands growing clammy and her pulse kicking into high gear, after all, you didn't live your entire life with an illness that controlled everything you did and still get terrified of death.

Nope.

What had her heart hammering in her chest was the fear that had been on the face of her friend and fellow PreySecurity colleague while they’d been video-calling just seconds ago. Scarlett Madden had just lived through a horrific ordeal. Kidnapped twice, accused of being a traitor, and of making plans to sell a drug that all four Athena Team members had created together to a notorious weapons trafficker.

With her name cleared and a fledgling relationship with SEAL Tate Laurier, Scarlett should be on cloud nine. Yet as soon as she’d glimpsed something in the plane she’d freaked out and demanded to see the pilot.

“Lucy, whatever happens, don’t trust him,” Scarlett’s voice screamed through the phone she’d dropped and was now lying on the floor at her feet. “That’s Zander, my brother. He’s supposed to be dead. If he’s there then you’re not safe.”

Shock had her turning to gape at the pilot.

At Zander Madden.

A man who was supposedly killed in action a little over eighteen months ago.

How could a dead Delta Force Operator be flying a plane for Prey?

Not possible.

While she hadn't met Zander many times in the years she’d been friends and teammates with his twin sister, what little she knew of him was that he was incredibly smart, driven, and determined. He also loved his sister despite the distance that had grown between them after he enlisted in the Army.

But that Zander would never allow Scarlett to think he was dead when he clearly wasn’t.

So, if he’d been prepared to deceive his twin in the worst possible way, what else was he willing to do?

Was it a stretch to wonder if he was somehow the mole who had framed his sister to take the fall for him? How would Zander even know about the Reactivator? They’d started working on itsix months before his supposed death, so there was a chance Scarlett had talked to him about it.

But why would he want to sell his twin sister’s drug to a weapons trafficker?

And why had he taken this job when he knew it would put him in contact with Prey and someone who knew his sister?

There was no time to quiz the man on what exactly it was he was doing here and what he hoped to achieve because the plane engine was still whining, and Zander—who had introduced himself to her as Zeke when she met him at the airfield—was the only thing standing between her and certain death.

Did she trust him?

Nope.

Not as far as she could throw him.

Which was not far at all. While physical fitness was important to her, a way to compensate for her epilepsy, and she spent a minimum of an hour working out in the gym every single day, there was no way her slight five foot three, one hundred and ten pound frame could so much as budge Zander’s.

He had to be at least six foot three and close to two hundred pounds of pure muscle. His eyes were blue, but she knew he had to be wearing contacts because Zander Madden’s eyes were brown just like his twin’s. With a deep tan and his hair a little darker than she remembered, it was no wonder she hadn't recognized him.

“Why are you here?” she demanded as her hands curled around her seatbelt. Not that the belt across her stomach was going to do her much good when they crashed. From the way Zander was fighting with the plane and the ground quickly rushing up to meet them, she knew that it was the inevitable outcome.