The Seven Sins: Cross Reckoning

Chapter 4:What Jonathan Knew

The alarm cut through the hallway like a blade, and Silas was already on his feet before the second nurse reached the door, both of them disappearing into Rosalind's room in a blur of blue scrubs and shouted numbers he couldn't make sense of from where he stood.

"Get back," a third nurse said, appearing from nowhere, one hand flat against Silas's chest, pushing him toward the wall. "You need to stay out of the way, sir, right now."

"Is she coding?"

"Sir."

"Is. She. Coding."

The nurse didn't answer him, which was its own answer, and disappeared through the door herself, leaving Silas standing in the hallway with his hands curled into fists at his sides, watching shapes move behind a curtain that had been yanked shut, a monitor screaming somewhere on the other side of it in a flat, unbroken tone that even someone with no medical training understood the meaning of.

Reyes appeared at his shoulder. "Silas."

"Don't." Silas's voice had gone somewhere low and dangerous, the calm from ten minutes ago burned off completely. "Don't tell me to sit down."

"I wasn't going to." Reyes kept his voice even, the voice of a man who'd learned a long time ago how to talk to Cross men when the world was coming apart around them. "I was going to say the note's still in your pocket. Whatever's happening in there, it doesn't take that away from you."

Silas didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on the gap at the edge of the curtain, on the shapes moving faster now, urgent, someone calling for a crash cart, and for one long, terrible minute the flat tone from the monitor didn't change.

Then it did. A beep, then another, ragged but there, and the urgency in the room shifted from something desperate to something merely serious, and Silas felt his own chest unlock a fraction, though his face never once let it show.

A doctor came out eleven minutes later, pulling gloves off his hands, his expression the careful neutral of a man about to deliver news that could go either way in how it landed.

"She's stable again," he said. "For now. It was a second event, more severe than the first. We're moving her to intensive care." He glanced between the two of them. "Are either of you family?"

"No," Silas said. "But I need to speak with her the moment she's able to have visitors."

"That won't be tonight. Possibly not tomorrow either." The doctor's eyes narrowed slightly, reading something in Silas's face that made him choose his next words more carefully. "Is there a reason this is urgent? Because if there's something relevant to her care that you're not telling us."

"There isn't," Silas said. "I just need to know when I can see her."

The doctor studied him a moment longer, then nodded, the kind of nod that meant he'd decided not to push it, and walked back through the doors he'd come from.

Silas pulled the folded note from his jacket pocket and read it again in the fluorescent light, the words no more forgiving the fourth time than they'd been the first.

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

"If she doesn't wake up," Reyes said quietly, "that note might be all we ever get."

"She'll wake up." Silas folded it away again. "She held on for twelve minutes in the back of a car with a stranger's hand on her shoulder because she wanted her daughter to know she was alright. A woman like that doesn't let go easily."

"You don't know that."

"No," Silas admitted. "But it's kind of you to let me say it."

Reyes almost smiled at that, catching the echo of Rosalind's own words handed back to him, but the moment didn't hold, because Silas's phone buzzed in his pocket, once, sharp, and when he pulled it out the screen showed a number he didn't recognize.

He answered without a greeting.

"Who is this."

There was a pause on the other end, long enough that Silas almost spoke again, and then a voice came through, male, controlled, careful in a way that told Silas the man on the other end had rehearsed this call more than once before making it.

"You don't know me," the voice said. "But I knew your father. And I think you and I need to have a conversation before Dominic Kade realizes you already know more than you're supposed to."

Silas's grip on the phone tightened. "Say your name."

"Not on this line." A pause, tight and deliberate. "There's a document, Mr. Cross. Your father's handwriting. Every name, every vote, everything they did that night. I know where it is. And I know you're the only person left alive who has a right to see it."

"Why call me. Why now."

"Because Rosalind Hart wasn't supposed to survive tonight," the voice said. "And that tells me they're already cleaning house faster than I thought they would. Which means we don't have much time left to talk at all."

The line went dead before Silas could ask another question, the dial tone flat and endless in his ear, and he lowered the phone slowly, staring at the blank screen like it might still yield something if he looked hard enough.

"Well?" Reyes asked.

Silas's jaw set, something cold and certain settling into his eyes.

"Someone else knows what my father left behind," he said. "And whoever tried to make sure Rosalind never woke up to tell me, they just told me exactly how scared they are."