The Seven Sins: Cross Reckoning

Chapter 3: Blood in the Study

"Somebody help her, oh God, somebody help her, she's not, she's not breathing right."

The scream had come from the hallway, and by the time Silas reached the door a second voice had joined it, high and panicked, and then a third, the whole house tipping over into chaos in the space of ten seconds. He pushed past Dominic without a word, out into the corridor, and found a knot of guests already gathered around a woman on the floor, an older woman in a black dress, her hand pressed flat against her own chest, gasping in short, wet pulls that didn't sound like they were pulling in enough air.

"She just collapsed," someone was saying. "She was fine, she was fine a second ago, and then she just."

Silas crouched beside her without thinking about it, two fingers finding the pulse at her throat, counting, and it was there, thin and fast, skipping in a way that told him this wasn't theater and it wasn't grief either. This was a body actually failing.

"Someone call for an ambulance," he said, not loud, but the kind of voice that cut through a room anyway. "Now."

"I already, I already did, they said, they said fifteen minutes, we're too far out, they said "

"Fifteen minutes." Silas looked up and found Reyes already pushing through the crowd toward him. "She doesn't have fifteen minutes."

"There's a car out front," Reyes said. "Mine. Faster than waiting."

Silas didn't answer, just scooped the woman up off the floor, one arm under her knees and one behind her shoulders, and she weighed almost nothing, frail in a way that made the whole thing feel more urgent instead of easier. She grabbed weakly at the front of his jacket, her breath rattling against his collarbone.

"Please," she managed. "Please, my daughter, someone tell my daughter."

"She'll know," Silas said. "Hold on. Just hold on."

He carried her straight through the crowd, past guests who scattered out of his way without being asked, out the front door and down the steps two at a time, Reyes already at the wheel with the passenger door thrown open. Silas laid her across the back seat as gently as the speed would allow and slid in beside her, one hand braced against her shoulder to keep her from sliding as Reyes pulled out of the drive fast enough that gravel sprayed against the underside of the car.

"Hospital's twelve minutes if I push it," Reyes said, already pushing it.

"Push it." Silas kept his eyes on the woman's face, her lips gone the color of ash, her hand still fisted weakly in his jacket like she thought letting go might be the thing that killed her. "Stay with me. What's your name?"

"Rosalind," she breathed. "Rosalind Hart."

"Rosalind. Look at me. You're going to be fine."

"You don't know that," she whispered, and something almost like a smile ghosted across her mouth despite everything. "But it was kind of you to say it."

The twelve minutes felt longer than the whole drive out to the estate had. Silas kept talking, low and steady, asking her questions that didn't matter, how long she'd known his father, whether she had grandchildren, anything to keep her tethered to the sound of a voice, and by the time Reyes screeched the car up to the emergency entrance, a team was already coming through the doors with a gurney, someone at the house having called ahead.

They took her fast, wheeling her through double doors that swung shut behind them, and then it was just Silas standing in a fluorescent-lit hallway with blood, not hers, he realized after a moment, someone else's from earlier tonight, still dried under his fingernails from Marco's warehouse, and the sudden absence of anything to do with his hands.

Reyes came up beside him, breathing hard from the run in from the parking lot.

"That was fast thinking," Reyes said. "Fifteen minutes out there, that woman doesn't make it."

"I know." Silas's voice had gone flat again, the warmth he'd used on Rosalind in the back seat already sealed away somewhere Reyes couldn't reach. "Which is exactly why I don't understand why nobody else in that entire house moved."

Reyes didn't have an answer for that, and Silas didn't wait for one. He turned and looked back toward the doors like he could still see the estate through them, miles away now, his uncle standing in that study with fear written plain across his face for the half second before he'd caught himself.

"We're not going back tonight," Silas said.

"No," Reyes agreed. "Probably not smart to."

"That's not why." Silas's jaw tightened. "I want him to sit with it. I want Dominic Kade lying awake tonight wondering exactly how much I already know, and exactly when I'm coming back for the rest of it."

A nurse pushed through the double doors then, scanning the hallway, and found them.

"Family of Rosalind Hart?"

"Not family," Silas said. "But I brought her in. How is she?"

The nurse hesitated in the particular way medical staff did when they were deciding how much a stranger was owed. "She's stable. It was a cardiac event, we got to her in time, another ten minutes and it would have been a very different conversation. Whoever got her here that fast, she's lucky."

"Good," Silas said, and something in his chest loosened by a fraction of an inch, small enough that only he would have noticed it.

"There's something else, though," the nurse said, glancing down at a chart in her hands, her voice dropping a register. "She was asking for you before she went under. Said to tell the Cross boy something, she was very insistent about it. Made me write it down so I wouldn't forget."

She held the chart toward him, and Silas took it, scanning the hurried handwriting scrawled across the corner of the page.

Tell him it wasn't only Dominic. Tell him his father knew, before it happened. Tell him Jonathan wrote it all down.

Silas read it twice. Then a third time, slower, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less dangerous if he looked at them long enough.

"Written it down," he said quietly. "Where."

"That's all she said," the nurse told him. "She lost consciousness right after."

Silas folded the paper once and slid it into his jacket pocket, beside his own heartbeat, which had picked up its pace in a way nothing all night, not the warehouse, not the study, not even the mark on his father's throat, had managed to do.

Because if Jonathan Cross had known the vote was coming, known his own brother was about to sign off on his death, and had written it down anyway, somewhere, in some form, then somewhere in this world there was a document with his father's own hand on it, naming every single name at that table.

And whoever had it now either didn't know what they were holding, or they knew exactly what it was worth, and they'd been sitting on it since the night he died.

"We need to talk to her again," Silas said. "The second she's conscious."

"They won't let anyone in tonight," Reyes said. "Not after what she just went through."

"Then we wait." Silas turned toward the row of plastic chairs lining the hallway wall and sat down like he intended to occupy that exact seat for as long as it took, hands loosely folded, expression already sliding back into the stillness Reyes had come to recognize as the only mask the man ever wore. "Because whatever my father wrote down, whoever else was in that room needs it to disappear a lot more than I need to sleep tonight."

Somewhere down the hall, a monitor started beeping in a rhythm that wasn't steady, and two nurses broke into a run toward the room they'd just taken Rosalind Hart into.