Page 1 of Healing Warriors

ONE

nadia

I slidin my seat as Shai took a turn too quickly. But no one told her to slow down. We all knew every second was precious.

“Hello?” Charity’s voice filled the silent, speeding car as she lifted her phone to her ear. No one had to ask her who was on the other line.

Shai, Ella, and I had been Aurora’s Girls for years now, and we’d been on the same team for nearly all that time. We’d learned to anticipate the others’ moves and when we added Aria to our team just a few weeks ago she somehow fell into that same sync, becoming one of us almost instantly.

Aria.Just the thought of her name clogged my throat. This was all wrong. If anyone should have been kidnapped it should have been . . . well, not her. She was too green, too young, too innocent. At just twenty, she hadn’t seen the same things we had; she wasn’t prepared for this. What she must be seeing now—I took a deep breath and pushed those thoughts out of my head. Letting myself imagine the horrors the traffickers were inflicting on Aria wouldn’t help anything.

Don’t get me wrong. Aria could hold her own. Better than her own, actually. In training she was known as the one woman no one else wanted to go up against. She had fire in her veins when it came to what we did: saving and protecting women from the exact kind of situation she found herself in now. But training for the dangerous and cruel world we worked in was drastically different than actually living in it. Even though I knew it was inevitable, I didn’t want Aria to see the reality of our world. There was something about her sweet spirit that urged all of us to protect her.

But we hadn’t done that. And now Aria was gone.

I swallowed back the lump in the throat and guzzled down my now lukewarm coffee. I didn’t mind that it was stale. Everything about this situation was wrong, but the caffeine flowing through my veins was a tether to normalcy, the only thing keeping me from losing my mind as we waited in the car.

“Yeah. No, you guys did the right thing,” Charity said into the phone after what felt like forever.

Charity was a loaner, filling out our team while we were down a person. She was on the phone with her original team, the one she would have been working with if we still had Aria. Our boss, Susie, didn’t want us to go into the field without a full team, especially because we were the ones preparing to go into the belly of the beast to find Aria and get her back to her family. But the hard part wasn’t invading the beast—it was finding the beast.

“I’ll let them know. Stay safe,” Charity said, ending the call and putting her phone away.

I wondered if that last phrase was something Charity would have typically told her team members, or whether she was as powerfully affected by Aria’s situation as we were. Sure, as Aurora’s Girls, we knew what we’d signed up for. Danger on every shift. Vindictive husbands, raging pimps, despicable crime lords—we’d seen them all. Fought them all. Brought them all to their knees.

But we almost never lost one of our own. We fought for others’ safety, not our own. So the entire company was reeling from the loss of Aria, feeling shaken that this could happen. But the three of us—Ella, Shai, and I—were feeling it the most. We not only felt fear for Aria, but a tremendous load of guilt. She shouldn’t have been alone in that bathroom. If Shai and I had gotten to that danky bar even a few minutes earlier or had never split up in the first place . . .

But we had to push the guilt aside and focus. We’d all been trained not to let emotions guide us while on the job. In the heat of the moment, they were a liability, so we were pretty skilled at locking them deep down inside of us. It was the reason Susie employed half a dozen therapists at all times.

“The bar is swarming with cops. My team can’t even get out of their cars. Cops have closed the whole street and are questioning everyone in the vicinity,” Charity reported.

Silence once again descended. We didn’t need words. There had just been two options as we’d considered our next step, two clues we’d gotten from the investigation into Aria’s disappearance. One was a bar on the other side of town, closer to Aurora’s headquarters. The bartender at the bar where Aria had gone missing had told the cops that he often worked at this other bar as well. The cops had already been there and a little birdie had filled us in on what they’d found so far. The second clue was a business card, discarded at the garage where this group had originally taken Aria. It gave us simply the address of a laundromat.

I’d made the call between the two locations. Thanks to my previous work as a defense attorney, I was a little closer than most to understanding the inner workings of a criminal mind. Not only had I studied some of the worst perpetrators in the world, but I’d defended some of them, spent time speaking with them. I understood their desires and the dark twists of their minds and saw firsthand how little they feared.

I shook away the clammy feeling that gripped me whenever I remembered my previous job. It wasn’t that I regretted it. I still held to the belief that one was innocent until proven guilty and good people could be blamed for horrific things. Those good people had needed lawyers like me. But in my experience, those clients had been few and far between. And my bosses at my previous law firm didn’t care about guilt. They cared about one thing: cold, hard cash. And the worst of humanity typically had lots of it. Eventually I could no longer stomach enabling the guilty to go free and I’d walked away.

Thankfully, that was when I’d found Aurora’s Girls. I’d been so broken. In a relationship with a man who had emotionally torn me apart, I had literally felt like the scum of the earth. I’d felt that his abuse was my just deserts for what I’d done in my career. But somehow Susie saw beyond my scars. Or maybe she’d welcomed me because of them. Either way, I now spent each and every day atoning for my past. Bit by bit, I was making the world a better place with my one superpower: my knowledge of the law.

My past career, although full of moral potholes, could at least be helpful in moments like this. The bar would have been a bust. We’d known we only had time to investigate one location, and the cops had the same clues we had. We knew they’d have men on both scenes soon, so we just hoped that their manpower would be limited at two in the morning and they could only check one locale at a time. I leaned forward to glance at the GPS on Shai’s phone even though I’d checked it just seconds ago. Five minutes. We should get to the laundromat in five minutes. If we got there and found it was blocked off as well . . .

My stomach clenched. That couldn’t happen. These were our only clues, and Aria’s trail had gone cold. Clearly, these guys were professionals and had done all they could to cover their tracks. The fact that we had anything was a miracle, one we were clinging to.

Ella pulled her phone out of her pocket and frowned at the screen. We all knew better than to have ringers turned up while we were working. Our jobs demanded stealth, and there was no simpler way to get caught than the untimely ringing of a phone.

“It’s a number I don’t recognize,” Ella said. She showed the screen to me as if I would somehow know who was calling her.

I shrugged. I hadn’t memorized a phone number since I was six and my parents drilled my own home phone number into me.

“Answer it,” Shai demanded from the driver’s seat without taking her eyes off the road as she hurtled around another corner.

She was right. The call could be a telemarketer or it could be another clue. Even the tiniest chance of information meant Ella had to answer.

“Hello?” she said within seconds of Shai’s demand.

“Ella?” I heard a female voice respond. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t quite place it.

“Speaking,” Ella said, scooting close to me in the backseat and holding her phone a couple of inches from her ear so that I could easily overhear the other end of the call.

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