The heir they buried

Chapter 7

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 hours had managed: it cut straight through whatever was about to happen next and reminded him what actually mattered in this hallway.

He followed the sound.

He found her on a gurney shoved against a supply closet near the loading doors, parked in the one corner of the hallway nobody bothered walking past. A thin blanket, worn nearly translucent from years of washing, did nothing against the draft that came through every time someone wheeled a delivery in from outside. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored in a way that hadn't been this bad the night before, a faint rattle catching at the edges of each breath that made his own chest tighten in something close to panic. He crouched down and took her hand, cold at the fingertips, and pressed it gently between both of his own, as though he could warm it back to what it should have been through will alone. He thought, absurdly, of every fever she'd sat through with him as a kid, cool cloth on his forehead at three in the morning, never once complaining about the hour, and it struck him now as obscene that he couldn't return even that much. Something in him went permanently cold looking at her like this, some door in him closing that he understood, even then, was never going to open again.

He was still crouched beside her when the doctor arrived, a woman introduced through the chaos as Dr. Marchetti, clearly briefed already on a version of events that didn't match anything Desmond had actually done.

"I'm told you assaulted a member of my staff," Marchetti said, arms folded, keeping a careful distance like she'd already decided which side of this she believed. "And that you've never once made a real payment toward this patient's care."

"That's not true," Desmond said, but Roslyn was already talking over him, arriving behind the doctor with a hand pressed dramatically to her own collar.

"He grabbed me," Roslyn said. "I was doing my job and he grabbed me. Ask anyone, he's been unstable since he got here, going on about buying rooms he obviously can't afford."

"I have money on his account from the night before," Desmond said, forcing his voice level. "My last renewal still had time on it when she moved my aunt out to a hallway like she was garbage."

Marchetti's eyes flicked to Roslyn and back, and for a moment Desmond thought she might actually push for the truth of it. Then something in her posture settled, the particular exhaustion of someone who'd learned that fighting for the truth in this building rarely changed the outcome. "The ward is fully booked," she said instead, like the fact alone erased the question of how it had gotten that way. "No exceptions. That bed's gone to a family who can actually cover it."

"There has to be something." Desmond kept his voice level, though it cost him more than it should have. "Anything. A closet with a door on it. I don't care."

Marchetti's gaze dropped briefly to Beatrice, still curled small on the gurney behind him, and something in her expression flickered before she caught it and smoothed it away again. She hesitated, glancing once toward the far end of the corridor, and for a moment something like reluctant honesty crossed her face. "There's one space left in the building. A suite built years ago for a visiting head of state, back when this hospital used to host things like that. Nobody's used it since, because nobody who's ever walked through those doors could afford to." She said the figure, and it landed in the hallway like something dropped from a height, heavy enough that even Roslyn went quiet for a second.

Desmond followed her gaze down the corridor to a set of double doors unlike any of the others, dark wood where everything else was scuffed white paint, and beside them, a small brass plaque catching the fluorescent light. Kestrel Regional Health, engraved in letters too tasteful to be an accident. He said nothing about it, filing the detail somewhere he wasn't ready to open yet, though something in his chest turned over at the shape of the name.

Roslyn recovered first, laughing before Marchetti had even finished saying the figure, certain, the way she'd been certain about everything so far tonight, that the number alone would end this conversation for good.

Desmond wiped at the cut still bleeding faintly along his jaw, one of the last gifts Barrett's men had left him, and looked at both of them without raising his voice.

"Prepare it," he said. "My aunt sleeps in it tonight."

For a moment neither of them said anything at all, the number and the declaration both still hanging in the air between the three of them, waiting to see which one was going to be the one that won.