Beneath the Fire (A Guardians Novella) Read Online Free Page B

She knows that,” Bates gave a full-on shit-eating grin.
    Nathan jerked his chin up in agreement and without another word to any of his team mates, he left the men’s locker room. He quickly pulled out his phone to check for any messages from Lucy. None. Frowning, he texted her again. He had sent her a message earlier asking if he could come over after practice. It was pushing 10:00 p.m. so he knew it was kind of late for a school night. But their schedules had not jived lately and he had not seen her in three days. She had said she had some catching up to do before spring break and needed to write several research papers and had not wanted any distraction.
    Well, tonight was the same thing and he was missing her desperately. It wasn’t even about sex. He would be content simply sitting on the couch as she worked on whatever she needed to do for school as long as they were together in the same room. Fuck, he had turned into a sap.  
    There was no doubt, he was falling in love with her.
    After ten minutes with no response, he kicked the tire of his bike. Fuck it, he was just going to drive over there and pound on her door. He was seeing her tonight whether she liked it or not.
    It was a short five minute trip from the school to her apartment since she lived so close to campus. It was a two-story structure having a unit on each floor. She was renting the second floor apartment, accessible by outside stairs attached to the side of the house.  
    He parked his bike in front of the building and glanced up. Her unit was dark. He frowned. She couldn’t be asleep already if she was working on a paper. Quickly making his way up the rickety steps, he did a series of quick raps on the door.
    “Lucy?” Nathan called. “Babe, it’s me, Nathan.”
    A dog started barking in a neighbor’s yard.
    Exhaling in frustration, he tried to call her but after the requisite few rings it went to voicemail. Was she blowing him off?
    A strong foreboding twisted in his gut. He had an app to track her phone. Tim had hacked into her network provider’s system which allowed him access to her account.
    He fired up the app and clicked on her ID to check where she was. The location, when it came back, made him curse. She was not home. She was fifteen miles clear across town. She had lied to him.  
    ***
    “I’ve cross-checked the girls’ identities with their families,” Lucy told her brother. They were at the house of Felipe Sanchez—a close friend of her brother’s. She and Eva had been meeting at this location in a middle-income DC suburb for the past three nights.   The house had a walk-in basement which they had converted into “command central” doing database searches of the kidnapped girls’ families, logistics, and videoconferences. All access was provided of course, by one ryker569 tapping into missing persons and police databases. Ryker569 also provided the secure laptop that she and her brother were using to communicate. Lucy was getting a buzz on all this high-tech sleuthing, she thought she might have a future with the FBI when all was said and done.  
    Eva weighed in. “I agree, it’s better if we do not inform the girls’ families yet. The less number of people that know about our operation, the better. It might cost us some dough to set the girls up somewhere, but I’d rather not raise their families’ hopes up until we have them securely across the border.”
    Leo nodded in agreement. Lucy smiled at her brother. She had not seen him in over seven months. He had gone to California to visit their mother the same time Lucy was back there before she had started school again. Leo was a masculine version of Lucy. Three years older than her, he had jet-black hair and a light olive complexion. Although he was a couple of inches taller than her and lanky, there was no doubt they were closely related. He liked wearing heavy-framed glasses and looked like a nerd. But he was a cat burglar, and a very good one. He justified his