His Secret Nest: Trapped by the Alpha Boss novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Motel off I-76

"That's not your card," Noel said. "You were on your knees in front of the whole pack at nine forty."

"I know where I was."

"Then somebody cloned it."

"Or somebody took it out of my desk." Fletcher closed his eyes. "I keep a spare in my desk. On thirty-one."

"Next to the closet."

"Next to the closet."

He started the engine.

His hand slipped off the key.

"You're not driving," Noel said.

"I'm fine."

"You're gray. You're bleeding into your jeans. Move over."

Fletcher moved over.

The first motel off I-76 had a sign with half its letters dead and a clerk who didn't look up from his phone.

Noel paid cash for one room and parked the truck nose-in by the door.

Before he did anything else, he sent all forty photos to Fenella.

Then he locked the sample jar in the glove box and put the key in his pocket.

The room had one king bed with an orange spread, a wall unit that rattled, and a lamp with a cigarette burn on the shade.

Fletcher sat on the edge of the bed and peeled off his sweater.

Noel made himself look at the wound and nothing else.

Fenella had thrown her spare trauma kit behind the truck seat before they left.

"In case he does something heroic," she'd said. "They always do something heroic."

Noel opened it on the bed.

Suture, lidocaine, gauze, a little bottle of iodine.

"You've done this before?" Fletcher said.

"On pig skin. In a weekend course. Fenella made me."

"How did the pig do?"

"The pig was already dead."

"Encouraging."

Noel washed his hands in the bathroom until they stopped shaking.

Then he knelt on the carpet between Fletcher's knees.

The silver had burned a line across Fletcher's ribs, six inches long.

Noel cleaned it, and Fletcher hissed through his teeth, and his hand closed on the orange spread.

"Talk to me," Noel said. "Distract yourself."

"About what?"

"About anything."

Noel put the first stitch in.

Fletcher went rigid, and then he started talking.

"The first thing I lost was a tie," he said. "Navy, with little silver dots. Two and a half years ago."

Noel tied off the stitch.

"I thought the cleaners took it," Fletcher said. "Then the gray one went. Then a pair of cufflinks that came back the next day, because whoever it was didn't want cufflinks."

"Cufflinks are useless."

"So I started leaving things."

Noel's needle stopped.

"A tie on the boardroom table," Fletcher said. "My gym hoodie, in a locker I didn't lock."

"Fletcher."

"The blue shirt. I hung it on a chair in Conference Room C at seven at night and went home. In March."

Noel looked up at him.

Fletcher was looking right back, and there was no Alpha in his face at all.

"You knew," Noel said.

"I knew someone was taking them. I didn't know who." Fletcher swallowed. "I wanted to find out. I kept telling myself it was security."

"Was it security?"

"No."

"What was it?"

"It was that whoever took them took the ones I wore most." His voice went rough. "Not the expensive ones. The ones that smelled like me."

Noel put the next stitch in.

His hands were steady now.

It was the rest of him that wasn't.

"When I opened that closet," Fletcher said, "and saw you lying in it in that shirt, I wasn't surprised. I was relieved."

"Relieved."

"That it was you. That it was the chemist from three who laughed at the coffee machine every morning and never once looked at me."

"I looked at you."

"You never looked at me."

"I looked at you all the time," Noel said. "I was just very good at it."

He tied the last stitch.

Eleven of them.

He taped gauze over it, and his fingers stayed flat on Fletcher's ribs after the tape was done.

Fletcher didn't move.

The window behind the curtain had started going gray.

Then gold, along the bottom edge.

Noel stood up.

"Give me your wallet."

Fletcher blinked at him.

Then he took it out of his back pocket and handed it over.

The pizza menu was folded in the bill pocket, behind his license.

Noel had known it would be.

He unfolded it on the nightstand under the burned lamp.

One. A room with a lock. Two. A lab bench. Three. Fenella and Maddie. Four. No touching.

He took the motel pen off the nightstand.

He drew one line through rule four.

Then a second line, because he was thorough.

"It's daylight," Noel said.

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