Page 1 of Lacey's Fight

CHAPTER ONE

August 2nd

6:58 P.M.

So, this was how she was going to die.

Chaos.

What should have been a quick in-and-out rescue had turned into complete and utter chaos.

All thanks to an unexpected storm.

With visibility down to a couple of feet, the rumble of thunder competing with the crashing of waves for top volume, and the lashing rain, there was no way she was going to be able to find the boat again.

Staying on the boat would have been the smart choice. Lacey Smith absolutely acknowledged that. Jumping into the ocean in the middle of a storm wasn’t one of her smartest choices, but then again, no one had ever accused her of making smart choices.

Loud, flirty, sassy, outgoing, confident, and bubbly, those were words the people in her life—or even people who had just met her—would use to describe her, but never sensible or logical.

Nope.

Guess she was the only one of her sisters—okay, so they weren’t sisters by blood, but they’d grown up together and were her family—who hadn’t been blessed with the rational gene.

But what else was she supposed to do?

Leave the poor girl to drown alone in the cold, unforgiving ocean?

Yeah, no.

Not going to happen.

Lacey didn’t care if this decision wasn’t the most reasonable she could come to. There was no way she was going to allow this girl to drown, not when she could do something about it.

Leaving her team on the boat to deal with the group of rich, drunk college boys who had used their parents’ money to buy a couple of women they were keeping on a yacht, Lacey had straightened her arms above her head and dived into the choppy water.

Immediately it had swallowed her up.

She and her sisters had had a crazy upbringing, but nothing had quite prepared her for this.

When she was just a baby, her father and two older siblings had died in a house fire. Her mom had been out that night, and her dad had managed to get her out of the house but gone back in for her older brother and sister.

Unfortunately, none of them made it out.

Her mom, unable to deal with the fact that she’d been out visiting the man she was having an affair with at the time of the fire, had committed suicide just two weeks later leaving Lacey an orphan with no one to take her in. Entering the foster care system, her case worker had been dirty and sold her into human trafficking where she’d ended up with a man who called himself The Master.

The Master trained her and her sisters to be killing machines. She had been training since she was a toddler and knew how to fight, shoot, and wield a knife and a sword. She could withstand torture as well as execute it, knew how to kill with her bare hands, and could withstand any and all conditions.

Including the ocean.

Only water had never been her friend.

There was just something about it that creeped her out.

Not a bathtub or a pool, they seemed to contain water, tame it. Even ponds and lakes she could deal with if she had to although she didn’t enjoy it.

But the ocean …

It was freaky. So powerful that no man could control it. It took what it wanted without a care, and right now what it seemed to want was her very soul.

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