2. Ever #2
Time has gone soft in the center and sharp around the edges.
I know exactly how many staff members have walked through the west corridor since we arrived.
I can’t tell how long Reva has been holding my hand.
I only know it’s approaching dawn, that Cal’s surgery took several hours, by the time he walks through the doors.
The doctor is tall, tired, and still in surgical cap, with his mask pulled down at his throat. Blood marks one sleeve. He scans the room, and the moment his eyes settle on us, every body changes.
Reva stands too fast.
I stand with her because her knees almost fail. Shiloh rises on her other side. Deacon moves behind us, silent as a locked door.
“Family for Calvin Boudreaux?” the doctor asks.
“Yes,” Reva says. Her voice is rough. “I’m his daughter.”
No one corrects her.
The doctor nods. “He’s alive.”
The sound Reva makes is not relief. Relief should be cleaner.
“He made it through the first surgery,” the doctor continues.
“He lost a significant amount of blood. The bullet caused internal damage, and there was bleeding in the abdominal cavity. We repaired what we could tonight, but he’s critical.
There may be liver involvement. There’s also concern about the lung because of the trajectory of the bullet and the blood he aspirated before arrival. ”
Reva’s hand clamps around mine.
“How long until you know?” she asks.
“We’re moving him to ICU. He’ll remain intubated. We may keep him sedated, possibly in a medically induced coma, to give his body the best chance. The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are important.”
“That means bad,” she says.
“It means serious.”
Her chin lifts. “Serious is what doctors say when they don’t want family to hear bad.”
The doctor holds her gaze. He does not insult her with a smile. “It is bad. It is not hopeless.”
Her grip trembles, and I want to break something.
“Can I see him?” she asks.
“Briefly, once he’s settled in ICU. A nurse will come get you.”
Reva stays standing after he is gone. Her face does something strange. It does not crumple. It goes still, the way water goes still before it freezes.
Shiloh touches her elbow. “He’s alive.”
She nods, a jerky motion that looks borrowed.
“He’s alive,” Shiloh says again, softer.
“I heard him.”
I look past her toward the hall.
A woman in pale blue scrubs pushes a linen cart near the elevator bank, every movement too slow. Everyone else in this building moves with purpose, even when exhausted. She stops beside the hand sanitizer station and turns her wrist as if checking a watch.
There is no watch. There is a bracelet, though.
Small dark beads. A silver cross. A red enamel rose no larger than my thumbnail tucked between them.
My body goes cold before my mind finishes the connection.
Deacon is already looking. Our eyes meet across Reva’s shoulders.
He moves first.
The woman sees him. Her hand drops to the cart handle, and for one foolish second she tries to pretend she has not been caught.
Then she runs.
Deacon cuts through the waiting room doors. I shove my phone into Shiloh’s hand.
“Keep her here.”
Reva turns. “What is it?”
Shiloh catches her before she can follow. “No.”
“Ever.”
I’m already in the hall.
The woman reaches the stairwell door. Deacon is ten steps behind her. Fast. Controlled. Too controlled for a hospital corridor full of people who have no idea a ghost from La Rosa just walked past their vending machines.
I pull up the stairwell camera on my tablet as I run.
The feed glitches.
For half a second the image breaks into gray blocks, then returns to an empty stairwell.
She prepared.
I slam a palm against the stairwell door and go through after Deacon. The metal clangs behind me. Below, footsteps echo. Two flights down. Maybe three.
Deacon takes the stairs in a way that barely touches them. I follow, cursing the dress shoes I wore to sit in a van.
A service door bangs open below.
I switch cameras again. Loading dock. East exit. Ambulance bay.
There. Pale blue scrubs. Hood up now. She cuts behind a parked delivery van.
“East dock,” I call.
Deacon changes direction mid-landing and disappears through the second-floor service door. I keep to the stairs because the camera angle shows the outside gate, and if she has a car waiting, I might catch the plate before it disappears.
The feed flickers again. Someone is inside the system. My system.
Anger hits, hard and useful.
I drop onto the bottom landing and type while moving, forcing the hospital firewall to reject the outside packet.
The feed clears in time to catch a black sedan rolling away from the dock with the woman inside.
No front plate. Tinted windows. Rear plate smeared with mud thick enough to hide the numbers.
The car turns out of frame.
Gone.
Deacon appears on the loading dock a second later, gun low against his thigh, hospital lights striping his face. He looks at the road where the sedan vanished.
I join him, breathing hard.
“You saw the marker?” he asks.
“Rose and rosary.”
His jaw sets.
“She wasn’t here for Cal,” I say, though I do not believe it.
“She was here to see where he landed.” Deacon looks back toward the hospital. “Or to confirm Reva stayed with him.”
I think about the woman moving slowly by the elevator. Waiting for the doctor. Watching our waiting room through glass.
My hand shakes again. This time I let it.
“They followed us from the estate,” I say.
“Likely.”
“They can get into the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“They know Cal is alive.”
Deacon’s eyes are dark and flat. “Yes.”
The word should make the next step easy. It does not. It only makes it necessary.
We go back inside through the service hall, avoiding two nurses and a security guard who looks at Deacon’s gun and makes the wise decision to remember something urgent in the opposite direction.
By the time we reach the surgical waiting room, Nash is already standing between Reva and the doors. Shiloh still has one hand on her arm. My phone is in his other hand, screen lit with the camera feed he does not know how to read and held like a weapon anyway.
Reva sees my face.
“What happened?” she asks.
Nash turns his head toward me. “Report.”
“La Rosa marker. Scrubs. Fake staff or volunteer. Ran when Deacon moved. Sedan at east dock. No plate.”
Reva pulls free of Shiloh. “They’re here?”
“They were,” I say.
Her face drains of the small amount of color the last hour had left her.
Nash looks at Deacon. “Confirm?”
“Rose. Rosary. Trained enough to run before contact.” Deacon’s voice stays even. “Isabel knows where Cal is.”
Shiloh swears under his breath.
Reva shakes her head once. “I’m not leaving him.”
No one answers fast enough.
“I am not leaving him,” she says again, louder. “He just got out of surgery. He’s in ICU. I am not walking away because some woman with a bracelet took a field trip through the lobby.”
“She got inside the hospital,” I say.
“Doesn’t change anything I just said.”
“She got inside before ICU transfer finished.”
“I heard you.”
My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Then hear this, too. They will use him to get to you. They will use you to get to him. They will use every hallway in this place because hospitals are built for trust, and Isabel does not need many people to turn trust into a weapon.”
Her eyes flash. Good. Anger is better than the frozen thing from before.
“You knew something would happen at the gala,” she says. “You knew, and I went in anyway.”
The hit is clean because she is right. My mouth goes dry. Shiloh says her name, quiet warning, but she keeps looking at me.
Nash steps in before either of us can bleed any more into the room. “We are not moving tonight until you see Cal. After that, we decide.”
The dialogue stops there because Nash is smart enough to let silence do some of the work.
A nurse appears at the far end of the hall, looking at her tablet. “Family for Mr. Boudreaux?”
Reva turns so fast the sweatshirt slips off one shoulder.
The nurse smiles, tired and kind. “He’s settled. One visitor for a few minutes.”
Reva takes one step. Then she looks back at us.
At Nash, who is already building a war around her.
At Deacon, who is staring down the hall where La Rosa disappeared.
At Shiloh, who is still on the floor in his ruined tux in every way that matters, holding coffee she has not touched.
At me, with a tablet full of useless footage and a hand that will not stop shaking.
“I’m seeing him,” she says.
Nash nods. “We’ll be here.”
She looks at me last.
The fear in her face is quiet now. That almost destroys me. I close my hand around the tablet until the case creaks.
“Right behind you, firefly.”
She follows the nurse down the hall the few feet to ICU.
As we walk, my gaze flicks between the hall and the tablet in my hand. I watch every camera between here and there.
I watch the elevator bank, the stairwells, the nurse station, the reflection in the dark glass beside the vending machines.
I watch Shiloh sink back into the chair in the waiting room, elbows on his knees, face in his hands.
I watch Deacon move to the hall and place his back to the wall.
I watch Nash lift his phone to call someone who will make this hospital regret every unlocked door it has ever had.
I watch because it is the only thing I can do.
Cal is alive. Delia is gone. La Rosa is inside the hospital.
And Reva has asked me to guard a door when what I want is to tear the whole building apart and rebuild it around her, one locked entrance at a time.