Chapter 11 #2
Fletcher hitched a breath, and the pressure in the air doubled.
She stood totally, completely, utterly still. The only muscle moving in her body was the rapid cant of her heart, a sound so loud she was half certain Molly could hear. The woman’s shadow moved toward her window. Time to fight back.
Somehow.
When Fletcher tried to make a break for it, her arms and legs tangled in the fabric. It swirled around her, twisted, strangled. She fought against the curtains, and the curtains fought back, all while Molly tried to shish-kebab her.
Once she finally ousted the curtains, her options for defense mechanisms were slim. For all Dyer’s peculiar design tastes, Lydell Manor was seriously lacking in the Things That Double as Swords department. Unless.
Her eyes lifted.
Curtain rods were basically fencing sabers. Fletcher yanked on the drapes, but the pockets snagged on the beam. Molly was all too eager to take advantage of the hesitation.
With two fistfuls of fabric, Fletcher used all her weight, leaning into it. Finally, threads snapped, and the curtain rod clattered to the floor. She grabbed it with two hands, swinging it to block Molly’s attack. The blade’s impact reverberated through her bones, through her gritted teeth.
“You don’t have to do this,” Fletcher said. She pushed, digging in her heels, until Molly and her machete bounced back. “We bonded on the pool deck! I thought you were a girl’s girl!”
Molly parried, the flat edge of the machete cold against Fletcher’s arm. So close to drawing blood. “Bonded? I don’t know anything about you. Every person at this company has a deep dark secret. But not Fletcher Spence.”
“No way! I totally have dark secrets. Like, um, I still watch Friends reruns even though the jokes aged like two percent milk.” The machete shattered an amber vase on Molly’s rebound.
“Sometimes when Sales asks me to print them reports I pretend the inkjet’s low on toner.
” Think, think, think. Fletcher circled back for her heels, sliding her feet into each shoe as she hopped away from Molly’s advances.
“Oh, last year I used the company card to pay for a manicure before our big meeting with Condé Nast!”
Molly’s eyes narrowed. “Your biggest secret is getting your cuticles trimmed?”
So what if she liked striving for perfection?
Perfection was neat and tidy, a clearly defined box, and she knew the exact shape of the lines she needed to fit herself into to achieve it.
Or at least look like she’d achieved it.
Perfection had made her an undeniable asset to Dyer, to the company.
A lifelong overachiever. An agreeable only daughter.
Perfect. In all ways except one.
Molly moved to swing again—if it came down to Fletcher spilling her guts or Molly spilling them for her, she was always going to choose the former.
“I spent ten years in a relationship with someone I didn’t love,” Fletcher blurted. Light glinted in Molly’s gaze. Intrigued. And she’d stopped swinging her blade, which was a huge plus. “I almost married him.”
For a moment, a little humanity snuck its way back into Molly’s face. “Why didn’t you?”
“It’s what my parents wanted. It’s what Kent wanted.
It was what everyone wanted, except me. I wanted to stay in New York, join Jet-Setter, take photos all over the world.
But I—” Fletcher gulped, squeezing her eyes shut.
Admitting it to herself as much as to Molly, she whispered: “I wanted to kiss Waylon Cartwright.”
Like she’d been struck, shame slashed through Fletcher’s chest. Remnants of the electricity she’d felt in that stuffy coat closet, the spark of an emotion she hadn’t felt with Kent in too long, even then.
What little residual kindness existed in Molly’s heart must have shriveled up and died because her ordinarily bright eyes went dark. “You wanted to kiss him? I knew it. You never really cared about Ferdinand, traitor.”
Fletcher’s retreat came to a grinding halt. Her back flattened against the paneled wall. A roar ripped up Molly’s throat, the machete arcing toward Fletcher.
This was how she died. Carved like a Butterball turkey.
Then someone sneezed. Milliseconds later, something red and fuzzy zinged across the foyer—straight into Molly’s neck. Lodged in the jugular region.
A silver dart with fringed red fletching shocked Molly’s mouth into an open O.
Her movement slowed, slowed, slowed as her hands came swinging down.
Enough of a delay for Fletcher to roll out of the strike zone.
The blade embedded itself into the wall, slicing through the wallpaper straight to the stud. Right where Fletcher’s head had been.
From above, someone asked, “What did you do?”
Both Brians huddled against the walkway railing overlooking the foyer. She knew she’d seen something moving around up there. In Brian’s hands? A tranquilizer gun. The kind that zookeepers would use to knock out an elephant. His index finger lingered on the trigger.
“Sorry. Allergies,” Other Brian said, hushed.
“Don’t you take medicine for that?” Brian hissed back.
Other Brian reached into his pocket for a wadded-up, already-used Kleenex to mop up his nose. “My bad, man. I didn’t mean to bump you.”
Fletcher would have sworn Brian said, “Come on. Bertram will have our heads if she gets away.”
Almost like he hadn’t been aiming for Molly at all.
Intention didn’t matter. A syringe the size of her forearm still jutted out of the side of Molly’s neck, and the injection must have been taking hold quickly. Molly’s left arm drooped to her side and dangled there. Her face followed suit, skin sagging drastically, like a botched Botox job.
The eye that wasn’t fast asleep, rolling around in its socket, burned with rage. All of it was guided toward Fletcher, which felt a little unfair given she hadn’t been the one to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart.
The real culprits raced down the staircase, flinging the gigantic gun around like Rambo wannabes.
Fletcher had to get out of there. Now.
Shooting out of the foyer, she aimed toward the executive suites. Molly pried the machete out of the wall and lurched after her. Or tried to. Her lopsided Frankenstein gait wasn’t built for running. Everything after that happened in slow motion:
Molly’s numb foot snagged on the embroidered drapery.
Her body sloped forward, falling—and falling—and falling.
The arm holding the machete hit the ground first. Blade up. Still clutched in her good hand.
And in the fraction of a second that followed, Molly crashed to the floor on top of it. The machete speared through her chest, ripping between rib bones. Fletcher couldn’t look away fast enough.
There was a squelch and a gasp and a wheeze, a whole symphony of horrifying onomatopoeia. Black film edged the corners of Fletcher’s vision, like she’d slapped a terrible Instagram filter over her eyes.
“Oh my god, Molly.”
Molly, of course, didn’t respond. She had a packed schedule of Bleeding Out on the Parquet Floor, followed shortly by Not Getting a Proper Burial Because Her Coworkers Were Lunatics.
And, unfortunately, Fletcher’s calendar was also filled with back-to-back agenda items. First on the list was getting the hell away from the Brians.