The heir they buried

Chapter 6

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 did."

Desmond set the card down on the arm of the chair, careful, like it might bite him if he held onto it a moment too long.

Marlowe reappeared not long after, formally introduced this time as the head of his personal security, a title she accepted with a small nod that suggested she'd been doing the job in practice since the alley, paperwork notwithstanding. Behind her stood a young woman in a pressed uniform, hands folded, eyes down in a way that made Desmond immediately uncomfortable.

"Ivy," Corwin said. "She'll be seeing to your household needs."

"I don't need someone seeing to my household needs," Desmond said, more gently than it probably sounded, and reached to take his own bag from where a second staff member had been carrying it. Ivy flinched like he'd raised his voice at her, and it took him a moment to understand why: nobody in this house apparently reached for their own things, and a Wexford insisting on it was, evidently, its own kind of disruption. She couldn't have been more than twenty, hands roughened in a way that told him she'd worked harder jobs than this one before landing here, and something about her reminded him uncomfortably of himself two days ago, careful and apologetic in rooms that weren't built for people like either of them.

"I'm sorry," Ivy said quickly, eyes still down. "I didn't mean to overstep."

"You didn't." He held her gaze until she believed him. "I've just never had anyone carry anything for me before. Give me time to get used to being carried."

That night he barely slept at all, not from the ache still radiating through his ribs, but from counting the hours until morning, when he could finally do the one thing that had mattered before any of the rest of it. Beatrice was still lying in a public ward that treated her like a line item, and every hour he spent under this roof was an hour she spent under that one. He kept picturing her waking up alone in that ward, still believing her nephew was somewhere across town parking cars for strangers, with no way of knowing the ground had shifted so completely underneath both of them overnight.

He asked Corwin to give him one more day before meeting her properly. He wanted to walk in himself first, unannounced, the way he always had, and move her somewhere that would finally treat her like a person instead of a balance sheet before he let anyone else into the picture. Corwin agreed without argument, something like understanding in his face, and had a car waiting before Desmond had even finished asking.

He had them take him straight to the ward, the same one he'd left her in the night before, medical bills be damned now, ready to hand over cash on the spot before she'd even opened her eyes to see who'd walked in. He'd rehearsed the moment more than once on the drive over, the exact words he'd use, the exact look on her face when she understood that none of it was a dream either.

The bed was empty.

Sheets stripped down to the mattress, an orderly already running a mop across the floor beneath it without once looking up at him, like the space had simply reset itself overnight and erased whatever had been in it. Desmond stood in the doorway for a full five seconds before his body remembered how to move.

Panic went through him faster and colder than the beating had, four men with fists doing less damage in one night than this single empty bed managed in half a second. He walked the hallway once, twice, checking numbers on doors that all looked the same, his voice climbing louder each time he asked and got nothing back. Nurses he didn't recognize gave him wide berths as he passed, sensing, correctly, that whatever was happening in him wasn't something they wanted to get near.

He was on his third pass when a nurse rounded the corner with a clipboard against her chest, an expression on her face that had already decided how this conversation was going to go before it started. His stomach dropped before she'd said a single word. He recognized her, vaguely, from the weeks he'd spent shuttling in and out of this ward, though her name only came to him once his eyes dropped to the badge clipped to her scrubs.

Roslyn.

"Where is my aunt?" he asked.

She looked at him the way a person looks at a mildly annoying line at the grocery store. "I moved her out to the corridor overnight," she said, no more weight in it than a comment about the weather. "We needed the bed for a patient who could actually pay for it. Charity cases don't really get to hold a room hostage."