Page 1 of Fighting for Ella

CHAPTER ONE

February 5th

9:09 P.M.

This was wrong.

The worst thing she’d ever done.

A betrayal of three of the people she cared about the most in the world.

Yet Ella Whitlock didn't stop what she was doing.

She couldn’t.

She’d made this decision and had to finish what she’d started even if she was having second thoughts.

Or third.

Or, heck, thousandth thoughts.

The truth was, she didn't really have a choice.

As much as it pained her to know that her three Prey Security Athena Team members would forever hate her for turning on them, Ella knew that this was something she had to do.

Besides, she comforted herself, it wasn’t like she was going to walk away from this alive.

Raul Castillo didn't leave loose ends, and she was a major loose end.

Shoving thoughts of her three best friends, Scarlett Madden, Lucy Elrod, and Cassidy Caddel, from her mind, she punched in the code for the safe where the four of them had hidden the only vial of the Reactivator that existed. The drug was a wonder drug that she and her team had been working on creating for the last four years. It worked to dull pain receptors, slow bleeding, encourage faster healing, and give the patient a much-needed burst of adrenalin.

They’d intended for it to be used to save the lives of men and women serving in the American armed forces. Intended for it to save lives. Ella was confident that it would have as well, but now everything was ruined, messed up beyond repair, and she was stuck sneaking out this vial from Prey’s lab.

No one knew that this small safe existed. They'd hidden it in the back of a little fridge they kept in the lab. Unless you knew it was there you would never suspect what it really was. Which had made it the perfect place to hide this vial of the drug when it became clear that they were getting close to perfecting it.

Not that any of them had imagined the disaster of the last month happening.

Who could have predicted it?

As Ella slipped the vial into her pocket, snatched up her purse, and hurried from the lab, she felt like her heart was being ripped in two. Loyalty to her friends warring with her need to do this.

There was no easy choice.

There was no choice at all.

When she’d taken the first step down this road, she’d committed herself to it.

To treason.

Because that’s what it all boiled down to.

She was taking a drug that had been intended to save the lives of her fellow citizens to hand it over to a Mexican weapons trafficker. Raul Castillo was at the top of the food chain in the weapons smuggling game. No one even came close. With all his money and the stellar reputation he’d built, he was on several countries’ wanted lists, but so far the man continued to evade capture.

Now she was going to meet him.

The address she’d been given felt like it was burning a hole in her mind.

No trail.