Novels by alicewinston33

The estate had gone quiet by the time Marlowe found him that evening, most of the staff retired for the night, only the low hum of the house's own systems filling the space where conversation would otherwise have been. Marlowe solved it before Desmond had to actually make the choice himself, which was, he was starting to learn, very much her preferred way of doing things.She found him in the east sitting room, not long after he'd finally stopped running the same two options through his head for what felt like the hundredth time, and set a single sheet of paper on the table between them like she was laying down a winning hand."A private referral," she said. "Routed through a foundation with a name nobody's ever going to trace back to Wexford in a hundred years of looking. It buys the surgeon's time without buying anyone's attention. For now, at least."Desmond read it twice, the way he seemed to be reading everything twice lately, and felt something loosen in his chest that had been

Desmond had spent the early morning at the hospital, watching Beatrice sleep in a room built for a head of state, half convinced he'd wake up back in the public ward and find none of the last two days had actually happened. It was Marlowe who eventually pulled him back to the estate, insisting the day's first fire needed his attention before he could go back to simply sitting with her.Word of a hundred million dollar transaction doesn't stay quiet for long, not when it moves through a hospital small enough that everyone from billing to the board knew everyone else's business by lunchtime. By the next morning, it had reached exactly the wrong desk.Kestrel Regional Health flagged the anomaly to its parent company the way it flagged anything that large and that fast, as a matter of routine rather than suspicion, a line item some junior analyst would have glanced at and forwarded up the chain without a second thought. That should have been the end of it. It wasn't.Marlowe brought the n

Roslyn broke first, and not with words. A laugh came out of her instead, short and disbelieving, then longer, rising until she had to press a hand flat against the nurses' station counter just to keep herself upright. A junior nurse two desks over glanced up at the sound, uncertain whether to be alarmed or amused."Prepare it," Roslyn repeated, wiping at one eye like she'd genuinely been moved to tears by the suggestion. "You want us to prepare the presidential suite. The one that's sat empty for six years because nobody in this city could afford the deposit, let alone the nightly rate. For a woman who couldn't cover a routine renewal fee.""I'm not asking," Desmond said. "I'm telling you to."Roslyn's laughter sharpened into something with more teeth in it, the kind of smile that had clearly gotten her out of trouble with plenty of other patients before him. "Fine. Let's make this interesting, since apparently we have all night to spare." She turned to face him fully, the exhaustion

Something in Desmond went past anger and into a register he didn't have a name for. His hand found Roslyn's collar before his mind had caught up with the rest of him, fabric bunching hard in his fist, close enough now that he could see her pulse jumping visibly in her throat, could see the exact moment she understood she'd badly misjudged how far she could push a man who'd already lost the last of his patience somewhere on a dark street an hour earlier."Let go of me," she said, and her voice had lost every trace of the boredom it carried a minute ago.He released her before he did something that would cost him more than his temper, stepping back into a hallway that had gone quiet around them, a handful of nurses and one visibly nervous orderly frozen mid task, watching to see what happened next.It was Beatrice's cough that had stopped him in the first place. Ragged, wet, carrying down the hallway from somewhere he hadn't checked yet, and it did what nothing else in the last twelve h

Corwin gave him the card sometime after midnight, sliding it across the desk like it was nothing more than a hotel key. "There's no limit on it," he said. "I had it made the week I confirmed you were alive."Desmond turned it over once in his hands, the weight of it strange for something so thin, and asked what it was worth mostly to have something to say. When Corwin told him the number, Desmond had to lower himself into the nearest chair before his legs decided the conversation for him a second time that night. He tried to imagine what a number like that even meant in practice, tried to picture it as rent, as groceries, as anything he had a frame of reference for, and failed completely. It sat in his hand like a foreign object that happened to be shaped like a card."That's not a number," he said. "That's not a number a person is supposed to hear about themselves.""You'll get used to it faster than you think," Corwin said, not unkindly, "though I'd be lying if I said I ever really

The room had gone quiet around them, staff and Marlowe alike withdrawing without being told to, until it was just the two of them and the small, exact click of the compass still fused together in Desmond's palm."Sit down," Corwin said, before the word had even finished leaving Desmond's mouth, guiding him by the elbow toward a pair of chairs near the window rather than the desk. "There's a great deal I owe you, and none of it is quick."Desmond let himself be lowered into the seat because his legs weren't offering him much choice in the matter. "Twenty years," he said, once he trusted his voice again. "You're going to explain twenty years to me right now?""I'm going to try." Corwin sat across from him, elbows on his knees, and for a moment he looked less like a man who owned an estate and more like a man bracing for something he'd rehearsed and still dreaded saying out loud. "The accident that took your mother. It wasn't an accident. The plane was sabotaged."The word landed strange