Page 47 of Her Forever SEAL

Lettie stopped.

“Then what?” Ryle prompted.

“She said I had five days.”

“I begged her not to kill my daughter.” She looked up at them with wet eyes. “She said she would never kill such a beautiful young girl when she could make so much money selling her instead.”

Lettie couldn’t say another word. She was sobbing. She handed over the vial of medication and Lydia asked to take her phone for a couple of hours. Lettie agreed. The women of Midnight Delta left at separate times within an hour. Angie, Lydia and Rylie had all parked blocks away from Peggy’s house. They agreed to meet up at Lydia’s house that evening, after Rylie, Angie and Sophia had arranged for childcare.

Sophia was the last to leave. Peggy walked her to the door.

“Can your friends really help?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ll call us?”

Sophia squeezed the woman’s arm. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Peggy wiped away a tear. “You’re kind of badasses, aren’t you? I guess that makes sense.”

Sophia frowned.

“I mean you’re married to SEALs. It kind of makes sense that you would be badasses.”

“We just take care of our own. And you two are ours.” Sophia leaned in and hugged Peggie. “Tomorrow. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

14

Lydia's house was the right choice for exactly the reasons nobody said out loud. It was the largest, it was the most secure, Clint had seen to that years ago without being asked, and it had a room off the main hallway that Lydia used as an office that could fit six women around a table and had no windows facing the street.

They arrived separately, ten minutes apart. Sophia last, after she'd gotten the girls settled at Beth's with a pizza and a movie and a reason that didn't require too much explanation. Beth hadn't asked. She'd just opened the door and taken the girls and squeezed Sophia's arm on the way back in and that was that.

Lydia had coffee ready and a whiteboard set up on the wall that was already covered in her careful block printing. Lydia was at the table with her laptop open. Rylie had her notebook out, the physical one she used when she was working on something that she didn't want on any server anywhere.

Sophia sat down and looked at the whiteboard. It was already more than she'd expected. Angie was running the briefing like it was a military operation. She probably got that from her grandfather, Pops. There was no preamble, no softening.

“The texts to Lettie came from a burner,” she said, standing at the board. “Unregistered. Untraceable to a name. But the phone was on when it sent, which means it pinged a tower.” She pointed to a map she'd taped to the right side of the board. There was a circle drawn on it in red marker. “Whoever sent those texts was inside this radius. Eastlake Vistas. And it has the most rental properties.”

“Do you think that’s where they have Bree?”

“Not a chance in hell. Too exposed. But I do think it would be perfect to house operatives who are surveilling Peggy and Lettie.”

“This means they’ve been running this for a while.”

“This proto-type came into NAS last September,” Rylie spoke up.

“I’m surprised they didn’t get the specs from the manufacturer,” Lydia said.

“I’m betting they want to know all the problems that the mechanics are finding. Even when they plug the holes, there still might be vulnerabilities our enemies can exploit.”

“I highly doubt that,” Sophia said. “Mason is really impressed with Dan.”

“Sorry, there’s always vulnerabilities,” Lydia sighed.

“Ladies, focus. We have an area where we think some of the operatives are. That’s good. Now, we need to figure out where they might be holding Bree.”

“The vial?” Sophia asked, pointing to the picture on the whiteboard. “Does that tell us anything?”