Identity Crisis - Rochelle Paige Page 0,1

better use it if she ever needed anything. Time had passed and I hadn’t heard from her again—until now.

Serena: I’m in trouble. Need help.

Me: What kind of trouble?

Serena: The kind where I’m on the run and looking for a place to hide out.

Me: Still in Atlanta?

Serena: Yes

The only time I’d ever been there was my quick trip to see her, so I didn’t have any contacts available to help with something like this. But I knew someone who could find some quickly.

Me: Hold on.

With the nine-hour time difference, odds were high Brody was sound asleep. He’d become a night owl ever since we made it home. I pulled up his name in my contacts and listened as the call rolled to voicemail, redialing two more times before he finally picked up.

“You better be calling me to bail your asses out of jail,” he rasped in a low tone.

“Like your brother wouldn’t be able to get his hands on as much cash as we needed at the drop of a hat,” I reminded him.

His snort of laughter made it clear he was just yanking my chain. “Then why the fuck are you calling me this early in the morning?”

“Do you know anyone in Atlanta who can help someone lay low for a couple days?”

“Someone?”

“Serena,” I sighed, knowing an interrogation would soon follow. Not only did Brody know me better than any other person alive, including my past with Serena, he was the reason my life had changed so much in the last year.

As someone who saw their mom poorly treated by wealthy people, I used to despise them. My father died when I was five, leaving her to raise me on her own. They’d been high school sweethearts and married young. With no education or job experience, she ended up cleaning houses to make a living.

She was damn good at her job, but that didn’t mean the families who hired her ever saw her as a real person. In their eyes, she was a convenience—a disposable one, at that. If something was broken, blame the maid. Can’t find a piece of jewelry? Blame the maid. It didn’t matter whether she had done anything wrong, or that it was usually their spoiled kid at fault. The bottom line was: she was replaceable and her wealthy employers never had a problem letting her go. Watching her accept their mistreatment, year after year, left me with a chip on my shoulder the size of a boulder.

Needless to say, I wanted better for my mom, and myself. My grades in high school were good, but not great since I’d juggled school, sports, and a part-time job to help lessen the load. With a full ride scholarship out of the question, college wasn’t an option for me. I finally found my way out when I joined the Navy. It broke my mom’s heart when I enlisted. She was scared to death of losing me too, but she accepted it like she did everything else in her life: with grace. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I didn’t need much to maintain my bachelor lifestyle and would be able to send money to her every month.

If I was going to dedicate my life to the military, I was determined to be the best of the best. Before I joined, I told the Navy recruiter I wanted to take the SEAL Challenge. It guaranteed me the opportunity to become a candidate and I wasn’t about to waste my chance when my time came.

Oddly enough, it was during BUD/S when I moved past my prejudice against the wealthy. I didn’t have a choice when Brody Slater blew all my preconceived notions out of the water.

Everyone knew his story since the exploits landing him in the military were in the newspapers. He was the spoiled rich kid whose older brother used their wealth to bail him out of yet another mess when he was a junior in college. Except, that time, he’d royally screwed up by hacking into a government computer system and the prosecutor wanted to make an example out of him. The best his brother’s lawyers could do was get them to agree to military enlistment instead of prison. How he managed to qualify for SEAL training was a mystery to me since one of the requirements was having a clean record. Sometimes they granted a waiver, which I assumed meant his brother pulled strings for him—again. Though, it didn’t really matter. No one could help him