Page 72 of The Deadly Shallows

“Last I heard, but I suspect he’s back to resting now. It was touch and go with that one.”

Brooke waited until Amanda left, and then another couple of minutes for her nurse to get invested in another patient, before hopping from her bed, sliding her slippers on, and peeking her head out the door.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Brooke entered the hall. Noah’s door was shut. Nurse Pamela must still be in with him. Looking the opposite way up the hall, she spotted a guardsman sitting outside a room about six doors down. She smiled. Connor Andrews’s room.

She needed to know what gator meant, to know what was so valuable about such an innocuous word that she was abducted and—she swallowed—that she was harmed for it.

She wouldn’t talk to Andrews without Noah present, though she was dying to. But it wouldn’t hurt anything to talk to the guardsman in front of the room.

She made her way down the hall, her slippers padding softly.

The guardsman rose at her approach.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Petty Officer Brooke Kesler.”

He pulled off his hat and held it in his hands. “I know who you are, ma’am. Petty Officer First Class Macken. Pleased to meet you.”

Great. The entire base probably knew about her abduction. She didn’t know why that embarrassed her. It hadn’t been her fault, and she hadn’t done anything wrong. . . .

No, she knew full well why she felt that way. She’d broke, told them the word Connor Andrews whispered to her. They hadn’t reacted to it verbally, but there had been a good pause before they started pressing her, torturing her, to find out if she knew anything else, or if she’d told anyone what Connor had said.

If she’d just mentioned it to Noah or one of the team, maybe it all could have been avoided.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at the guardsman. “Where are my manners.” She reached out her hand. “Nice to meet you too.”

Clutching his hat in one hand, he shook her extended one with his other.

“I’m just curious if he’s spoken yet,” she said, hoping Macken would be willing to share even if Noah wasn’t at her side. She glanced back down the hall, but Noah’s door was still shut.

“Nurse Pamela was the first one in after Andrews woke up,” Macken said.

“Do you have any idea what he said?”

“She left the door open, so I heard most, if not all of it. It was just basic stuff.”

She looked back down the hall. How much longer was Noah going to be? “So that was it?”

“Yes, but he might be saying more to the nurse who’s in there now. He went in seconds before you arrived but closed the door, so I haven’t heard anything.”

Brooke’s gut clenched. A second nurse. That wasn’t right. Not if Pamela was assigned to Andrews’s room.

Her body tensed. “Something’s wrong.”

Macken turned to open the door, but before he could, it opened from the other side.

The nurse—a male in blue scrubs—stood in the doorway.

“Sir, I need you to step over here,” Macken said, his hand on his service weapon.

The nurse’s gaze landed on Brooke, and a weird expression crossed his face. “I’m needed down the hall,” he said.

A chill rippled through her body. She knew that voice.

“That’s him,” she hollered. The gravelly-voiced man who’d tortured her.

The man bolted for the emergency exit, busting through the door and setting the shrill alarm blaring.