The heir they buried

Chapter 8

Roslyn broke first, and not with words. A laugh came out of her instead, short and disbelieving, then longer, rising until she had to press a hand flat against the nurses' station counter just to keep herself upright. A junior nurse two desks over glanced up at the sound, uncertain whether to be alarmed or amused.

"Prepare it," Roslyn repeated, wiping at one eye like she'd genuinely been moved to tears by the suggestion. "You want us to prepare the presidential suite. The one that's sat empty for six years because nobody in this city could afford the deposit, let alone the nightly rate. For a woman who couldn't cover a routine renewal f*e."

"I'm not asking," Desmond said. "I'm telling you to."

Roslyn's laughter sharpened into something with more teeth in it, the kind of smile that had clearly gotten her out of trouble with plenty of other patients before him. "Fine. Let's make this interesting, since apparently we have all night to spare." She turned to face him fully, the exhaustion of the last hour replaced with something closer to delight, the prospect of new entertainment visibly reviving her. "If your payment fails, and it will, you owe me whatever I decide to ask for. No arguments, no negotiating after the fact, no running back to whatever charity fund you've been leaning on. And if it somehow goes through," she added, clearly savoring the impossibility of her own sentence, "I'll resign on the spot and spend the rest of my career scrubbing bedpans. I'll sign something to that effect, if it'll make you feel better about the odds."

"Roslyn." Marchetti's voice went low and warning, her eyes flicking once to Desmond's split lip and the dried blood along his collar. "He was just attacked. Look at him. This isn't a game, and I won't have my staff turning a patient's family into a spectacle."

"It's the only game he's offering to play, and he's the one who suggested it." Roslyn didn't wait for permission. She was already moving, disappearing around the corner of the nurses' station and returning less than a minute later dragging a card terminal by its cord like a trophy, setting it down on the counter with the flourish of someone unveiling a magic trick. Two more nurses drifted over from an adjacent hallway, drawn by the sudden shift in the air, and Roslyn made no effort at all to send any of them away. If anything, she angled the terminal so the small crowd could see the screen clearly. She wanted an audience for this.

Desmond reached into his jacket and produced the card, the one Corwin had pressed into his hand less than a day earlier, the pin still sitting fresh in his memory from a text message he'd nearly missed reading in the chaos of everything since. For one unguarded second, watching it pass from his hand to hers, some old and familiar dread flickered through him, the same reflexive brace he'd carried through two years of watching his own cards decline in front of cashiers who tried to look like they hadn't noticed. He set it on the counter without letting any of that show on his face.

Roslyn picked it up like she was handling evidence in a case she'd already won, turning it over once in her fingers, running a thumb across the unfamiliar texture of it before sliding it into the reader with theatrical slowness, narrating each motion for the small crowd now gathered behind her. "Let's see. Insert. Wait for it to read." She glanced up at her audience, delighted with herself. "This is usually the part where it just gives up."

The machine beeped once, then held.

It didn't give up.

The screen hung on the same processing display a beat longer than it should have, then a beat longer than that, long enough that Roslyn's narration trailed off entirely mid gesture, long enough that her smile, still fixed in place out of habit more than confidence now, started to slip at the edges without her seeming to notice it was happening. The junior nurse who'd laughed earlier had gone quiet. Somewhere behind them, a printer nobody had been paying attention to began warming up on its own.

Marchetti, who had gone very still the moment she'd first felt the weight and texture of that card pass beneath her own gaze back in the hallway, watched the display now with an expression that suggested she'd already half suspected exactly what she was about to see, and had simply been waiting for the rest of the room to catch up.

The screen resolved.

APPROVED.

Roslyn stared at it for a long moment, close enough that the glow of the screen lit the underside of her face, then read it out loud, as though hearing herself say the word might make it mean something different than what it plainly said. "Approved."

Nobody corrected her. Nobody needed to. The nurse who'd laughed first now looked like she badly wanted to be anywhere else in the building.

Roslyn read it a second time, quieter, as though volume itself might change the outcome. It didn't. The word sat there on the screen, patient and entirely unbothered, exactly as certain of itself as she had been thirty seconds earlier, back when certainty had still been free.

Marchetti was the one who finally moved, stepping in to tear the receipt free before anyone could suggest running the transaction a second time out of pure disbelief. "Get the suite ready," she said, already turning to find an orderly, her voice several degrees warmer than it had been all night. "Now. Whatever she needs."

By the time the ink on that receipt had finished drying, Beatrice's gurney was already moving down the hall toward a set of doors with a brass plaque beside them and a name on it that Desmond fully intended to remember, for reasons that had nothing to do with hospitals at all.

Roslyn was still standing at the counter, the card terminal forgotten under her hand, when the gurney turned the corner and disappeared without her.