Michael steps around him, stooping and collecting up one of the unconscious cops by the ankles. He begins to drag him away, smiling grimly as he does so. “What did I say? Every fucking time.”
In my defense, fuck those bastards. They weren’t gonna let us in, and with this pain in my gut, eating away at me, I’m not exactly in the most patient of fucking moods. We move both cops out of sight, propping them up into sitting positions against the lowlying wall of a small building, that, from the whirring sound emanating from inside it, houses one of the hospital’s power generators. We cuff the cops together, smash their radios, and leave them there in the rain, but not before I lift a key card off them that will allow us entrance into the hospital.
The key card works. Inside the hospital, the four of us peer at the ward signs, trying to figure out the best way to find Sloane. Splitting up is generally a bad idea, but St. Peter’s is fucking huge. We need to cover a lot of ground and quickly. That’s the whole reason I called Michael in the first place; the more eyes, the better. After arranging to meet back at the side exit in thirty minutes and being expressly told to stay the hell away from Charlie, Cade and Michael head off to search the emergency room—this is the most likely place we’ll find Sloane, but it’s also the place where there are the most people who might recognize me and Lace. Those fucking mug shots the cops posted of me are a major pain in the ass, and so is the fact that Lacey absconded from a treatment room not twelve hours after waking up from a pretty intense suicide attempt. That means the two of us need to stick to the quieter areas—the canteen, the locker rooms, the admin levels upstairs, and the recovery wards.
The canteen is full of people. Mostly patients and their family members, obviously wanting to stay away from any area where they think they might get infected with some nasty super bug. I send Lacey out onto the canteen floor to scan the area a little more thoroughly than I can from the entranceway; she comes up with nothing. Thankfully no Charlie. No Sloane, either. No doctors at all, apart from one guy, an Indian guy, who enters the room as we’re leaving. I recognize him straight away—he’s the doctor that helped Sloane with Lacey when I brought her in and collapsed with her in a heap, bleeding all over the lobby floor of the emergency room. It’s not Lacey who’s bleeding all over the hospital floor this time, though. It’s me. Thankfully the guy doesn’t notice the bright crimson droplets pat, pat, patting onto the ground as we hurry away.
We search the recovery wards, slipping from room to room as silently as we can. Lacey takes the right-hand side of the corridor; I take the left. No Sloane, but I do come across something that makes my head fucking spin. Or rather, I find someone.
“Nothing over here, Zeth. Maybe we have to go up a floor. Come on,” Lacey says, but her voice is muffled by the roaring inside my head. I feel her small hand on my shoulder, and sense her peering around me to see what’s holding me up. She won’t know the woman lying in the bed, hooked up to a thousand machines, but I sure as hell do. “Who is it?” Lacey asks, her voice suddenly crystal clear and razor sharp as the roaring abruptly stops.
“It’s Charlie’s girlfriend,” I tell her, although girlfriend is a poor word to describe the Duchess. In a very old-school way, she is the epitome of a gangster’s mistress. Bella Mafia. Except Charlie’s English, not Italian. She looks like she might be dying, but then that’s not what’s surprising. What’s surprising is the fact that she’s even still alive. And also that my ex-employer isn’t here.
“She stabbed you,” Lacey says simply. Her little hand tightens on the doorframe, her knuckles going white.
“Yeah. She did.” I walk into the room, holding my breath. If the person in this bed were anyone else, a different person who had decided to take a knife to my stomach, my reaction right now would be decidedly more violent. But Sophie has been lied to for a very long time. I’m not angry with her. I’m angry that I got stabbed, sure, but I can hardly blame her. I don’t know how, but she found out everything that Charlie’s been up to the last thirty or so years, and she found out about me. She said so herself. Her voice, choked with rage, plays out in my head—And I know about you, too! I guess I betrayed her in the same way Charlie did. I practically grew up with her playing the part of a half-hearted and extremely unreliable surrogate mother, and I hid who I really was from her. She’s maybe the only person on earth I ever bothered to shield from that. She was always just so…oblivious to the world.