Page 37 of Their Alpha

Ihated running. I hated it so much that I cried silently, trying to hide it from Fletcher, for the first half hour after we sped away from the house. I’d hated it the first time, when I’d run away fromhishome in the middle of the night with nothing but the linen robe on my back. I’d hated it two years later, when he’d caught up with us and Fletcher had whisked me out of our hiding place in the mountains.

I especially hated it now, because not only were we leaving the home we’d made and thought was safe, we could be leaving Artemis, too.

Thinking about Artemis made me cry more than anything. Or rather, thinking about his baby, that I now carried inside me. I didn’t know what kind of hope I could or couldn’t hold out that Artemis might want to be a part of the baby’s life. I didn’t know if Fletcher would be okay withhaving Artemis remain as our friend. Or maybe something more. I didn’t even know what I felt about Artemis or the situation we were all in.

All I knew was that I loved Fletcher so much. I trusted him. If he said we had to drop everything and jump into the car to run, then that’s what we had to do. He would keep me safe.

About forty-five minutes into our flight, I gasped and jerked to sit upright.

“My laptop,” I said, feeling genuine pain in my heart. “I left my laptop at the house. I have a book to finish.”

Fletcher sent me a guilty, sideways look.

I gasped again. “I don’t have any way of getting in touch with my agent or my editor. I have a deadline to meet. What are they going to do when it looks like I’ve just disappeared off the face of the earth?” I didn’t even want to mention my fans and the people who followed me on social media.

Although now that I thought about it, maybe that was a good idea. Malachi had said he had moles in my social media followers that he’d used to find me. Had he somehow hacked into my agent’s or publisher’s records to find my address? Had he convinced them to just give away the information? He could be creepily persuasive sometimes.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Fletcher said with a heavy sigh. “You know he’d be able to trace you through your laptop, through any device that connects to the internet like that.”

I sank a little in my seat. I could have brought my laptop and just not connected to the internet. Fletcher was right to be cautious, though. Ifhefound me….

I couldn’t even contemplate the consequences.

The one bright light in the horrible situation was that Fletcher knew exactly what he was doing. He’d prepared for this happening.

About an hour after leaving the house, we stopped at a small rest stop. I hid in the backseat while Fletcher donned a medical mask and headed inside. He used two of the bank cards from sneaky accounts he’d set up in different names to withdraw the maximum amount the ATM would let him take.

We drove on, and fifteen minutes later, he stopped somewhere else to do the same with a few other cards.

Half an hour after that, he did it again.

Two hours after we’d left home, Fletcher had over twenty thousand dollars in cash. He drove us to a small, slightly seedy used car dealer that he must have scouted before, sold our car, bought an entirely different one with cash, then drove us on.

Ten minutes after we left the used car dealer, he pulled over in a secluded spot and got out to change the license plate.

Ifhewas following us, he wouldn’t be able to trace us using our phones or electronics. He wouldn’t be able to find us by bank withdrawals. He wouldn’t be able to trace our car. He wouldn’t be able to find us by license plate number. Fletcher definitely knew how to disappear.

Artemis wouldn’t be able to trace us by any of those things either, though.

I only got more scared once night fell. Fletcher had hardly said anything since we’d left the house. I could feel how tense he was. It was the usual anxiety I would have expected from running, but there was something more than that. I’d been concerned about his health earlier, after his heat had ended, but now I was even more concerned.

What if Fletcher was pregnant now, too? That thought buoyed me for a second. We could have twins. Well, almosttwins. It would be fun to go through pregnancy and childbirth together.

Then again, if our flight went wrong, neither of us would end up going through it and our babies wouldn’t get a chance to be born.

I was too afraid to ask what was going on or where Fletcher was taking me. I was definitely too afraid to tell him I was pregnant. Worrying about a brand new baby forming in me on top of everything else was the last thing my wonderful, brave husband needed now. So I kept quiet, stared out the window into the darkness of the wilderness north of Barrington, and waited for something to make sense.

I must have fallen asleep, because when the car stopped moving, I jolted awake.

“We’re here,” Fletcher said quietly, as if the car had ears.

I didn’t have the first idea where “here” was. Everything was black around us, indicating we were far away from any other civilization. I saw the vague shape of a small house outlined against the night sky, but it was completely dark.

Fletcher got out of the car, and I immediately had more clues about where we were. The scent of salt air hit my nose, and a strange roaring, crashing sound came to me from somewhere on the other side of the house. We were at the seaside.

I undid my seatbelt and climbed gingerly out of the car, looking around. It was definitely the seaside, but I didn’t see any sort of beach, and the crashing wave noise seemed to be coming from somewhere below me. That had to mean a cliff. In the other direction, there was nothing but thick, tall pine trees. I could only barely make out the drive we must have come up to get where we are.

“Where are we?” I asked in a tiny voice, turning another circle to take in our surroundings.

---