Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 22: Meridian General PART 1

She was lighter than she should have been.

That was the first thing Marcus registered as he caught her — not dramatically, not like the movies made it look, but the practical, immediate fact of a person whose body had simply stopped cooperating mid-sentence and was now redistributing its weight toward the floor. He had one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees before she'd finished falling, and he straightened with her against his chest and stood very still for a moment, looking at her face.

Pale. The particular gray-white of someone whose blood sugar had dropped past the point of negotiation. Her breathing was shallow but even. Her pulse, when he checked it with two fingers at her wrist, was present and steady but thinner than it should have been.

Two days without food. Consistent stress. Probably poor sleep before that.

Marcus looked at the plate of lunch sitting untouched on the hall table.

He had known this was coming. He had watched it building with the same professional attention he gave developing situations in the field — the compressed jaw, the eyes that were working too hard, the controlled movements of someone running on will rather than fuel. He had made food every morning and every evening because it was the only intervention available to him that she would not immediately and loudly refuse.

She had refused it anyway.

He carried her to the car.

Meridian General Hospital occupied a full city block on the northern edge of the medical district — twelve floors of modern architecture and quiet institutional authority, consistently ranked among the top three hospitals in the state. The general public knew it as an exceptionally well-run private facility with unusually good outcomes and unusually reasonable billing.

What the general public did not know — what appeared nowhere in any public record or institutional filing, buried instead beneath four layers of holding companies and a corporate structure that would have taken a forensic accountant three weeks to fully untangle — was that Meridian General's parent organization was a healthcare firm that sat inside a portfolio belonging entirely to Marcus Hayes.

He had bought it seven years ago for reasons that were operational rather than financial.

He carried Diana through the emergency entrance and had her on a bed and connected to monitors inside four minutes. The attending physician who materialized with immediate, unhurried efficiency did not visibly react to Marcus's presence beyond a brief, professional nod — the kind exchanged between people who understand the hierarchy of a room without requiring it to be stated.

"Stress-induced syncope," Marcus said. "Two days without adequate food intake, probable sleep deficit, sustained elevated cortisol. No head trauma on the way down — I caught her."

"We'll run a full panel," the physician said, already moving. "She'll be stable. An hour, maybe two."

Marcus nodded and went to the waiting area.

He had been there for twenty minutes when Catherine arrived.

He heard her before he saw her — heels on the lobby floor with the aggressive percussion of someone who had gotten a phone call, gotten into a car, and spent the entire drive converting alarm into fury because fury was more manageable. She came through the sliding doors with her coat half-on and her eyes already scanning for someone to aim at.

They found Marcus.

She crossed the lobby at speed.

Isabella was two steps behind her mother, moving faster, and she arrived at Marcus first — hand raised, arm swinging, the committed forward momentum of a woman who had made a decision somewhere in the car and was now executing it. Marcus shifted his weight by approximately three inches to the left. Isabella's palm connected with empty air and her own momentum carried her forward into a graceless half-stumble that she caught herself from with visible, burning humiliation.

She spun around.

"You —" Her voice was high and shaking. "You did something to her. What did you do?"

"She fainted," Marcus said. "She hadn't eaten in two days and she's been under significant stress. She collapsed in the entrance hall." He kept his voice level. "I brought her here immediately."

"You expect me to believe —"

"Isabella." Marcus's voice didn't change pitch or temperature, but something in it produced a brief, involuntary pause. "She's stable. The doctors are with her. That's what's relevant right now."

Catherine had arrived at his other side.