The Price she didn’t owe

The second complication

Marlowe went after him.

She caught Halloway halfway down the hall, phone still pressed to his ear, his voice low and clipped. She grabbed his arm and spun him around.

“Tell me what’s happening to my sister right now.”

Halloway held up a finger, finished his call, and pocketed the phone. His hands weren’t steady. “The pre-surgery scan picked up a mass near her spine. Small. It wasn’t there three weeks ago.”

The hallway tilted under Marlowe’s feet. “A mass. You mean a tumor.”

“We don’t know yet. It could be scar tissue from the last procedure. It could be something else. The surgical team is deciding right now whether to biopsy it while they’re already in there or close her up and run more tests first.”

“Decide what’s safer,” Cassius said, arriving beside them. “Not what’s faster.”

“That’s exactly the debate happening in that OR right now.” Halloway’s pager buzzed at his hip. He glanced at it and his face tightened further. “They need an answer in the next two minutes. Biopsy now while she’s already under anesthesia, or stop and reopen her in a week if it’s something serious.”

“You’re asking us to decide this from a hallway,” Marlowe said.

“I’m telling you they need someone with authority to decide, and it has to happen now.”

Cassius stepped forward. “Get me on the line with the lead surgeon.”

Halloway pulled a phone from his coat pocket and dialed, pressing it into Cassius’s hand the second it connected. Cassius put it on speaker.

“Dr. Iyer, this is Cassius Vane. I’m here with Ruby’s guardian. Give us your recommendation, not the options. Your actual recommendation.”

A woman’s voice crackled through, clipped and fast. “Biopsy now. If we wait, we risk losing the chance to catch it early, and we’d be putting her under anesthesia twice instead of once. My recommendation is to proceed.”

Marlowe grabbed the phone out of Cassius’s hand before he could answer. “Do it. Biopsy now.”

“Marlowe—” Cassius started.

“She’s my sister. It’s my decision.” She looked at him hard enough that he stopped talking. Then, into the phone: “Dr. Iyer, do it. Please.”

“Understood. We’ll update you as soon as we know more.” The line went dead.

Halloway took the phone back, his shoulders sagging with something between relief and exhaustion. “I’ll get you both set up in the family waiting area. It could be a few hours.”

He led them down another hallway, but Marlowe stopped walking halfway there, staring at nothing.

“What if it’s cancer,” she said quietly. “What if the transplant doesn’t even matter because there’s something else killing her that we didn’t know about.”

Cassius turned to face her directly, close enough that she had to tilt her head up. “Then we deal with it. Whatever it is. You’re not doing this alone anymore, whether you like it or not.”

“I didn’t ask you to save her.”

“No.” His eyes didn’t move off hers. “You asked me to sign a piece of paper. Everything after that was my choice.”

Her phone buzzed in her hand before she could respond. A text from the same unknown number.

Interesting that Dr. Iyer works for a lab funded by the Ashworth family. Ask yourself who really decided your sister’s fate tonight.

Marlowe’s blood went cold. She turned the screen toward Cassius.

His face changed the instant he read it. He grabbed the phone out of her hand and started walking fast toward the nurses’ station, dialing a number of his own before she could even ask what he was doing.