Big White Lie (Storm's Soldiers MC) by Paige Notaro Page A

my eyes, feeling my inner teenager emerge. “You don’t even know him.”
    Mamá clasped her hands and leaned toward me. “Do you?” she asked.
     
    ****
    Even before that, I knew the crash was coming. The guys I went for always came with a crash, whether it was days or weeks or - once - five months away. Eventually the broken thing at the heart of them would show itself and usually in the worst way possible.
    Calix had been so different. He had given me more than that sliver of hope that maybe, finally I had picked right.
    Instead, he broke all the damn records.
    I went back after lunch and felt a silence descend over the nurses’ station as I walked in. All of them looked at me with wide eyes.
    “What?” I asked, locking up my purse.
    A new girl, Amy, finally answered. “Rhonda and Dr. Geraldi were looking for you.”
    Rhonda was the day shift manager for us. She conducted performance reviews, but I saw her once a month or so for other smaller things.
    Dr. Geraldi was the chief of medicine for the whole freaking hospital. I had talked to him once: on the day I got hired.
    This felt an awful lot like the opposite of that.
    My balloon was well and truly punctured now. With shaky legs, I went over to Rhonda’s office. She was a big, round caramel-skinned woman, who normally had on a big plastic smile.
    It was nowhere in sight.
    “Rosa, please shut the door,” she said. “Sit.”
    “Am I being fired?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped with that news in this small dusty place.
    “I don’t think so,” she said. “Just come and sit.”
    I shut the door and took the bench at the side of her desk. “Amy said that Dr. Geraldi was looking for me, too,” I said.
    “He is, but let’s talk first.”
    “Ok,” I said. “About what?”
    “What you were doing last morning, around…” She checked her screen. “Ten forty.”
    “Just my rounds.” I curved around and tried to read the screen but she had some sort of protector over it. “What is that?” I asked.
    “Your keycard record.”
    A chill went up my arm. “From yesterday?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I didn’t use it yesterday except to check in. I even ate at my desk.”
    Rhonda studied my face, unblinking, then went back to the screen. “That’s not what your record shows.”
    “What does it show?” I asked.
    She checked my reaction again before answering. “It says that around ten forty in the morning you accessed Surgical Storage.”
    “Surgical storage? That closet where they keep the junk they pull out of people?” It had always seemed like a very misleading name.
    “The surgical facility that stores that material, yes,” Rhonda said.
    “Well, I didn’t. I don’t even see what I could get from there.”
    “Anything they pull out in an operation. Broken glass, blades…bullets.”
    A shiver ran up my spine. I could only hope it didn’t look guilty. “Bullets?”
    “That’s right. Now, two military police came this morning to collect fragments we pulled from a patient here. Those fragments were gone.”
    “I see.” I desperately wanted to ask the case name, but I was afraid of how I’d react.
    There was really only one possible patient she could mean.
    “The only unusual person to access that room was you,” Rhonda said.
    “Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t think I even know where it is. I haven’t stood in on an operation yet.”
    “But you had your keycard the whole time.” Rhonda rapped her fingers along the table.
    “No,” I said, carefully measuring out my words. “I didn’t say that. I actually went home and realized I couldn’t find it.”
    Her eyes flared. “So you didn’t have it with you?”
    “No,” I insisted. “You can ask Lilly. I called her to see if she’d seen it. “
    “And had she?”
    Her face remained stony. I thought a missing keycard would cause a bigger reaction.
    “You talked to her right?” I said. “You already know she didn’t.”
    “She says she