Page 18 of Lacey's Fight

Bad news was the last thing she needed right now.

“What’s going on?” Opal asked. Of the four of them, Opal was the “mother” of the group even though she was only a year older than Lacey and Pearl, and two years older than Ivory. Pearl was—or had been as she was getting better—the angry one. Ivory was the sweet one, and she was the bubbly, flirty one.

At least on the outside.

Right now, she definitely needed a bit of mothering. Too bad she didn’t have a real mother to fuss over her, although her sisters did a pretty good job.

“Raven and Olivia found intel,” Fox started slowly.

“On?” Pearl prompted, the least patient of the four of them.

“On The Master.”

At Fox’s words, Lacey felt herself and her sisters freeze.

The Master was the bogeyman of all their nightmares. Twice in the last year they’d come so close to finally catching him, but he always managed to slip away. In January, working the case where she’d met and fallen in love with Roman, Ivory had come face to face with him only for him to shoot her and a little girl her sister had been trying to rescue. Then a couple of months later, Pearl, who had been shot in that same previous encounter, had been captured and beaten by The Master, only for him to be gone by the time Jesse and a Delta Team arrived to save her.

He wasn’t getting away again.

“Where?” she asked. She wanted him so badly it hurt. “Where is he?”

“According to intel, he’s going to be hitting up an auction at an estate in England, looking for girls to replace the ones Pearl rescued,” Fox replied.

“I want in,” Lacey said immediately.

“Me too,” Ivory echoed.

“And me,” Pearl added.

“Me too,” Opal said, making it unanimous.

“I get it, I do. I remember how I felt when Evie was taken, how badly I wanted to be the one to kill the man who hurt her. Even though I didn’t get to be the one to take that kill shot, I’m glad he’s dead. I know how much you guys want The Master, but I can’t send you all in, you know that. As soon as he sees you all he’ll know it’s a setup. He’ll tell everyone you’re undercover and you’ll all get yourselves killed. Or worse.”

Unfortunately, they were all well acquainted with the or worse side of life.

Unfortunately, they also all knew Fox was right.

Only one of them could do this, and even that would be a big risk.

“Which one of us gets to go in after him?” Ivory asked.

Fox’s gaze moved over them one by one before settling on her. “Lacey.”

“Me?” Her eyes widened, not what she’d been expecting. Ivory was usually the one who went undercover, although Pearl had a few months ago, and she and Opal had done it before as well. “What’s my cover?”

“Married couple looking for young girls to buy to start an upscale brothel,” Fox replied.

Lacey winced because human trafficking was so much more prevalent than people realized, and that story could so easily be true. Then she asked the obvious. “So, which of you handsome guys is playing my husband?”

“None of us,” Fox answered.

“Then who?”

“Benjamin Blanchett.”

Ben?

Her Ben?

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