2. Ever
CHAPTER TWO
EVER
Hospitals are the only buildings in the world I think are absolutely unnecessary in their construction.
There are too many doors. Too many corners. Too much trust being placed in badges, clipboards, soft voices and shoes that don’t make noise on polished floors.
My teeth are on edge from the moment I step through the doors.
The waiting room outside surgery has three exits if I count the hall to the vending machines, four if I count the staff door behind the desk, five if someone is willing to break the window and drop one floor into the landscaped courtyard below.
Cameras cover the main corridor, elevator bank and west nurse’s station.
The stairwell camera is angled too high.
A small woman with a hood up could move under it if she kept her head down.
I know this because I’ve watched the feed six times. I hacked the hospital’s security system from a rigid plastic chair just inside the waiting room. It was absurdly easy. If I can do it, anyone can do it.
If I keep gathering information, I can pretend having it is the same as controlling a tiny piece of the situation.
My left hand shakes.
I shove it into my pocket and pace from the waiting room doors to the vending machines down the hall, then back again. Twenty-two steps one way. Twenty-two steps back. The floor clicks under my shoes. My jaw aches from holding still everywhere except my feet.
In the waiting room behind me, Shiloh sits on the floor in front of Reva.
He could sit in a chair. There are twelve empty ones, only three occupied by strangers pretending they’re not watching the bloodstained girl in the borrowed sweatshirt.
Shiloh ignores all of them and sits cross-legged on the tile. His tux pants are ruined. His sleeves are rolled to the elbows. There’s a bruise forming along his cheekbone from whatever happened between the garden and the ambulance bay—I’m assuming he put down one or more of Isabel’s goons.
He has a coffee in one hand and a paper bag from the gift shop beside his hip. Socks. Sweatpants. A soft gray sweatshirt with the hospital logo over the heart. Toothbrush. Bottled water. Tiny pack of tissues. A comb. Things I didn’t think to get and feel stupid about now.
He tried one joke ten minutes ago.
Something about the sweatshirt being a crime against fashion and therefore personally offensive to him.
Reva stared at the wall.
Shiloh stopped trying after that.
Since then, he’s stayed quiet, close enough that she can reach him, far enough that she doesn’t have to. That’s Shiloh’s gift. He knows where to put himself in a room full of pain.
I know where the exits are.
He knows where Reva is and how to help her.
She sits with her legs folded under her, one shoulder pressed into the corner of the waiting room couch.
The sweatshirt swallows her arms. The cuffs are pulled over her fingers, even though I know her hands are cold for another reason.
Her hair is still pinned from the masquerade, though half the curls have fallen loose.
Gold dust clings to one cheek. Dried blood marks the side of her throat where she must have touched herself without noticing.
Cal’s blood.
I look away before the thought can do anything useful to me.
My phone vibrates. I pull it out fast enough that the woman near the vending machine flinches.
Nash
Status?
I type one-handed.
Ever
Still in surgery. No update. Feeds patched. Police at north entrance and lobby. Hospital security sloppy. Staff shifts changing in forty.
His reply comes almost immediately.
Nash
Keep her inside the waiting room.
I look through the glass panel in the door. Reva’s eyes are open, fixed on nothing.
I type back.
Ever
She’s not the thing I’m worried about keeping inside.
The message shows delivered. Nash doesn’t answer.
He is downstairs handling police, hospital administration, the two uniforms who followed the ambulance, and whatever story needs to be built fast enough to keep Reva out of an interrogation room.
He looked at my hands when he got here, saw the tablet, the network map, the footage queue, and gave me one order.
Figure out what the fuck went wrong.
I turn at the vending machines and start the twenty-two steps back.
The last clear image from the pin is burned into the back of my eyes.
The ballroom had been gold, all chandelier light and masks and old money pretending rot has manners.
Reva’s signal held through the first dance.
Through Delia pulling her toward the side hall.
Through Nash telling her two minutes. Through the corridor shift where the audio bent under interference and came back thin.
Then the terrace. A guard in front of her.
Cal appearing out of nowhere like a man stepping straight through an old ghost story.
The gun lifting.
The shot.
I had been in the van with Shiloh, two blocks off, where we were told to stay because someone had to watch the perimeter, someone had to monitor comms, someone had to make sure Reva did not disappear from the feed.
I knew something would happen.
I knew it in the tightness under my ribs, in the static that chewed at the signal, in the way the chapel camera went dark six seconds before Delia pulled Reva toward the terrace doors. I told them. I said the feed was compromised. I said Deacon wasn’t with her, as planned. I said we should move.
Nash told us to hold position; Isabel was in the ballroom. It was fine.
I waited.
On the screen, Reva fell.
The guard stood over her.
The barrel pointed down.
For one second the whole world narrowed to her face tilted up toward a gun, her green dress spread around her, Cal bleeding beside her.
Shiloh swore so violently the driver slammed the brakes.
I was already out of the van before it stopped, tablet in one hand, gun in the other, my lungs too small and the distance too long.
The shot on the feed came before we made the gate.
Then another.
Then another.
Reva fired twice after the first miss. Her hands shook around Cal’s gun, but she adjusted. She aimed. She survived. That should make me proud. It does, somewhere underneath the part of me still back in the van, watching her die in three different futures before she manages to live in this one.
My hand starts shaking again, and I curl it into a fist inside my pocket.
“Ever.”
Shiloh’s voice pulls me back, quiet. Careful.
I stop near the doorway.
Reva hasn’t moved, but Shiloh is looking at her hands. The sweatshirt cuffs have slipped back. Her fingers are bare, scraped, clean on the surface from the sink in the ambulance bay, but not clean enough. Blood is still dark beneath her nails.
He looks up at me, and I know what he is asking without words.
I cross to the sink alcove near the waiting room restroom and pull paper towels from the dispenser. Too rough. I get more anyway, wet them with warm water, then take the travel pack of wipes from Shiloh’s gift-shop bag.
When I kneel beside him, Reva’s gaze shifts to me. She looks emptied out. That scares me more than the blood did.
“Hands,” I say.
She blinks once.
Shiloh wraps his fingers loosely around her wrist. “Sweetheart, let him.”
For a moment I think she will refuse because refusing is proof she is still in there. Then she extends one hand.
I take it with the kind of care I use on broken electronics and live wires. Her fingers are stiff. Cold. Dried blood sits under three nails and along the crescent of her thumb. I clean slowly, one nail at a time, keeping my pressure gentle.
She watches my hands instead of my face.
“I should’ve been faster,” she says.
The paper towel stills. Shiloh’s expression changes, pain flashing clean across it before he hides it badly.
“You kept him alive until the ambulance got there,” I say.
Her mouth tightens. “Maybe.”
“There is no maybe.”
She pulls in a shallow breath. “I’m tired of people telling me what I did right while everyone keeps bleeding.”
I don’t have an answer that deserves, so I keep cleaning her hand.
The waiting room doors open, and Deacon steps in from the hall. He has changed shirts. Black again. I do not know where he found one. Knowing Deacon, he had three stashed within walking distance in case the night required one.
His eyes go to Reva first. Then her hands. Then me kneeling at her feet.
Something moves across his face and disappears before most people would notice it. I notice everything right now because the alternative is noticing the surgery doors too much.
“No change,” I tell him.
He nods once. “Nash is keeping the police downstairs.”
“Delia?”
“Gone from the property before lockdown finished.”
Reva’s fingers twitch in mine.
I finish cleaning her thumb. “Routes?”
“East service corridor. Exterior camera dead. Car left without plates. Two bodies found in the chapel hall, both La Rosa. Neither talking.”
I hate this waiting room.
I hate the lights, the humming vending machine, the muted television no one is watching. I hate that the doors to surgery open only for strangers. I hate that my tablet can show me every hallway and still not show me Cal’s blood pressure, his oxygen saturation, his surgeon’s hands.
I can lock down a building. I can trace cameras, spoof credentials, jam phones, rebuild a timeline from reflections in glass. I can know the car that took Delia turned south by the river before the city swallowed it.
I cannot make Cal’s blood go back into his body. I cannot take that look off Reva’s face.
A nurse comes in to speak with the family across the room. Someone begins to cry. Reva flinches so hard her hand tightens around mine.
“Wrong family,” I say.
Her eyes squeeze shut.
Shiloh shifts closer on the floor, shoulder brushing her knee. He doesn’t touch more than that.
A doctor appears twenty minutes later. Maybe thirty.