His Secret Nest: Trapped by the Alpha Boss novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Eight Percent

At Mercy Hospital Fletcher has Maddie's pills tested and they're at eight percent strength, the pack summons Noel to the Hunter's Moon court, and Noel comes home to find his lab notebooks gone.

Noel ran out of the tower in the Alpha's overcoat with his collar still in Clay's fist.

Nobody stopped him.

Fenella's ambulance had already left Steel Plaza, so he took a cab to Mercy and paid the driver forty dollars to run two lights.

The omega ward was on the sixth floor, behind a door with a keypad.

Fenella was outside it in her navy uniform, hair coming out of its knot.

She looked at the coat.

"Okay," she said. "We're going to talk about the coat."

"Later."

She punched in the code and pushed him through.

Maddie was curled on her side in a hospital bed with the rails up.

She had both hands knotted in the blanket and she was shaking so hard the bed rattled.

"Grandpa," she said, and her face crumpled.

Noel sat on the edge of the bed and took her hands.

They were burning.

"They gave me a pen," she said. "It's not working."

"It takes a few hours."

"It's been forty minutes. I counted."

"Then you've only got two more hours to complain about it."

She laughed, and then she cried, and then she pressed her face into his arm.

She went very still.

She breathed in.

"Noel," she said. "You smell like me."

He had practiced this for ten years.

None of it came out.

"Yeah," he said.

"Since when?"

"Since I was sixteen."

"You're an omega." She stared at him. "You let me think I was the only one in the family. You sat with me when I presented. You held my hair."

"You threw up on my shoes."

"You told me it would be fine!"

"You were wearing a collar the whole time!"

Fenella leaned in the doorway.

"In his defense, it was a really good collar."

"You knew?" Maddie whipped her head around. "Fenella knew?"

"Fenella's known since tenth grade," Fenella said. "Fenella had to drive him home from chemistry class."

Maddie made a noise.

Then she grabbed Noel's shirt with both fists and pulled him down and held on.

"You stupid old man," she said into his shoulder.

"I know."

"I'm so mad at you."

"I know."

"Don't leave."

"I'm not going anywhere."

Her fever spiked again around ten.

Noel talked her through it the way he'd talked himself through it on the bathroom floor every three months since he was sixteen.

Count the ceiling tiles. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Ice on the wrists, not the forehead.

Fenella fed Maddie ice chips and told her the worst calls of her career, starting with the man and the goose.

Maddie laughed so hard she forgot to cry.

At eleven a smell came down the hallway, cedar and rain, and every omega on the ward went quiet.

Fletcher Stavely stopped outside the open door.

He didn't come in.

He looked at Maddie on the bed, then at Noel in his coat.

"How is she?"

"Ask her yourself," Maddie said. "I'm right here."

Fletcher's mouth twitched.

"How are you, Miss Arbogast?"

"On fire. You're the Alpha."

"I am."

"You're the guy from the video."

"Probably."

"My brother was in your closet."

"He was."

"Was it a nice closet?"

"Maddie," Noel said.

Fletcher held up a white bottle in a plastic bag.

It was hers. Hush, lot 0917.

"Your nurse gave me this," he said to Noel. "I asked the doctor to run it in the hospital lab."

"The hospital can't assay moonwort."

"This one can. The doctor is pack. I funded the machine."

The doctor came down the hall an hour later and handed Fletcher a printout.

Fletcher read it and handed it straight to Noel.

Active extract: eight percent of label strength.

Eight.

Noel had tested that lot himself. A hundred percent, on every sample.

Somebody had cut it to almost nothing after it left his bench.

Maddie had been taking chalk for a month.

So had Noel.

So had every omega in Pittsburgh.

"Three hundred," Noel said.

"Three hundred and twelve on the roll," Fletcher said. "And however many more there are like you."

"There are more like me."

"I'm starting to understand that."

Slow footsteps came up the hall, with a cane.

An old man in a brown suit stopped beside Fletcher.

The eldest elder of the Three Rivers pack. Noel had seen him once, at his mother's funeral, from across the room.

The old man looked at Noel.

"Noel Arbogast," he said, and held out an envelope.

The seal was wax, pressed with a moon.

"You are charged before the pack. Hiding your nature from the roll. And poisoning the pack's omegas with lot 0917."

Maddie sat straight up in the bed.

"He didn't poison anybody! He's poisoned too!"

"Then he'll say so," the elder said. "At the Hunter's Moon. October seventeenth. The Carrie Furnace."

He looked at Fletcher at last.

"The Alpha is not to interfere."

"Understood," Fletcher said.

The elder walked away, cane tapping, and the omegas on the ward stared at Noel through their doors.

Maddie's pen finally kicked in at one.

She fell asleep holding his sleeve.

Fenella drove Noel home at three.

They lived on the second floor of a brick duplex in Bloomfield, over a barber shop.

The front door was open.

The lock was hanging by one screw.

Fenella's couch cushions were slit and pulled apart on the rug.

Noel walked past all of it to his room.

The bookshelf over his bed was where he kept his bench notebooks.

Carbon copies. Every test he'd run in three years at Stavely, in his own handwriting.

Every lot. Every number. August thirtieth. Lot 0917. One hundred percent.

The shelf was empty.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend