Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: The Trade

I stood over the empty cooler and breathed.

Gardenias.

On the lid. On the latch. On the doorframe at the height of a small woman's hand.

She'd walked straight in.

She hadn't even had to search. She'd known the scent of that jacket better than anyone alive, because she'd held it on her bed and cried into it.

I heard Patsy yelling in the cook shack.

I ran.

She was standing at the counter by the bread box with the charging cord in her hand.

There was nothing on the end of it.

"My phone," she said. "The little witch took my phone."

The recording of Charmaine's confession.

The recording of Charmaine's fifty thousand dollars.

Both of them, gone in a cream sweater down the burn road.

The crew came in behind me one by one.

They saw the cord in Patsy's hand.

Somebody went and looked in Fraser's cabin, and came back, and said it out loud.

"The jacket's gone."

Nobody shouted.

That would have been easier.

The gray-bearded wolf walked to the window and stood there with his back to all of us.

"Eight years," he said. "Eight years he kept his mouth shut about that woman. And you put her to bed in our camp."

"I know."

"You smelled her, you said. You're a reader, you said."

"She was scared. That was real."

"Scared people lie better than anybody." He turned around. "You should know. You were scared at nineteen."

That landed where he aimed it.

I stood there and let it.

"Enough," Fraser said.

He was in the doorway.

I hadn't heard him come.

"She made a call," he said. "I made the same call. I'm the boss. You want to be angry at somebody, you're angry at me."

"You'd have thrown her in the river if Carys hadn't asked."

"Probably." Fraser looked at me. "But she did ask, and she was right to. There's a little boy asleep in Patsy's bed who'd be in that car right now."

Behind us, the pantry door creaked.

The boy stood there in yesterday's clothes, with his hair flat on one side.

"Where's my mom?"

Nobody said anything.

The kid in the yellow shirt crouched down in front of him.

"Hey. You like pancakes?"

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