Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 14

The waiting room at Baptist General smelled like burnt coffee and antiseptic, a combination Raine was starting to associate with this family specifically, two trips to this exact building in the space of ten days, and she wondered, not for the first time tonight, whether that was just bad luck or something closer to a pattern.

Cash sat beside her in a plastic chair bolted to three others just like it, elbows on his knees, staring at a muted television bolted high in the corner playing some infomercial neither of them were watching. Neither of them had said much since the ambulance doors closed on Wren back at the curve. There hadn't been much to say that wouldn't have sounded small against everything that had just happened.

"You've got blood on your sleeve," Raine said finally, because it was easier than any of the other things sitting in her chest.

He looked down at his forearm like he was noticing it for the first time. "Hers, probably. From when I carried her to the truck."

"You should wash that off."

"In a minute." He didn't move. Neither did she. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed the same way the porch light had buzzed back at the clubhouse, the same way every light in this town apparently buzzed, and Raine found herself cataloging the sound the way she'd catalog an engine that wasn't idling clean, filing it away as one more thing that hadn't changed in six years.

"Your dad called," Cash said. "While you were talking to the nurse. Wanted to know if he should come down."

"What'd you tell him."

"Told him to stay put and let Marcus drive him if he insisted, which he did, obviously, because he's your father and apparently none of you know how to sit still when somebody else is hurting." A ghost of something almost like a smile. "They should be here in twenty minutes or so." He rubbed a hand over his face, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "Marcus is going to want answers too. About tonight. About all of it."

"Let him get in line."

Raine let her head fall back against the wall behind her, eyes on the water stained ceiling tile overhead, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, just sat there in the particular silence of two people who'd been running on adrenaline for hours and had finally hit the wall where the body simply stopped having more to give. Somewhere down the hall a vending machine hummed and clicked, dispensing something to somebody else's worst night, and a janitor's cart squeaked past the doorway at the kind of hour when the whole building seemed to be running on half power, lights dimmed, voices low, everyone moving like sound itself cost something they couldn't afford to spend.

"I keep thinking about what she said," Raine admitted, eyes still on the ceiling. "Out there. About somebody else."

"Yeah." Cash's voice had gone careful, the same careful he'd used asking about Duke's heart on the phone days ago. "Me too."

"You have any idea who she meant?"

"No." He said it too fast, and Raine turned her head to look at him, something in his face that didn't quite match the certainty of his answer, a flicker there and gone before she could pin it down. "I mean. Maybe. I don't know, Raine. It's a small club. Could be half a dozen guys."

She let it go, mostly because she didn't have the energy tonight to chase down one more secret, and partly because some part of her wasn't sure she wanted to know badly enough to push.

His hand was resting on the armrest between them, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off it without actually touching it, and she found herself staring at the small distance separating his fingers from hers with an intensity that had nothing to do with exhaustion. It would have taken nothing, she thought, half an inch of movement neither of them had made yet, and the thought alone was enough to make her pulse do something inconvenient in a hospital waiting room at one in the morning.

"Raine."

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything yet."

"You were about to say something that was going to complicate a night that's already about as complicated as I can handle." She kept her eyes forward, on the muted television, on anything that wasn't his face. "Ask me again tomorrow. When I've slept. When my father isn't recovering from a hospital stay and my stepsister isn't currently in one."

"Okay." He didn't push, which she was grateful for, and he didn't move his hand either, which she noticed more than she wanted to admit.

A nurse in pale blue scrubs pushed through the double doors at the end of the hall, clipboard in hand, scanning the waiting room until her eyes landed on them.

"Family for Wren Voss?"

Raine was on her feet before she'd decided to stand. "That's us. How is she."

"Stable. Two cracked ribs, some bruising, minor concussion, nothing that needs surgery. She's going to be sore for a few weeks but she's going to be fine." The nurse flipped a page on her clipboard, businesslike, already moving on to the next thing on her list. "She's asking for someone. Keeps asking, actually, soon as she's lucid enough to talk. Somebody named Eli."

Raine felt Cash go very still beside her.

"Eli," Raine repeated, the name foreign and unplaced in her mouth. "I don't know anyone named Eli."

"Well, she does, and she's asking for him pretty insistently." The nurse glanced between the two of them, reading something in their faces she clearly wasn't equipped to interpret. "Either of you know who that is?"

Raine looked at Cash. Cash was staring at the double doors behind the nurse like he'd just seen a ghost walk through them, his jaw tight, his hand finally pulling back from the armrest between them, and whatever he knew about that name, it was written plainly enough across his face now that Raine didn't need him to say a single word to understand it mattered.