Chapter 71: The Old Hospital Wing

May 12 glowed beneath my father’s face like a fresh wound. WEST WING—ROOM FOUR. Gabriel stood under the rusted sign with a brown sleeve in his fist. Alive. Looking past the camera at someone I could not see. If the photograph was real, it proved one thing: my father had been there that day. It did not tell me what he found, who followed him, or how he died. Vittoria had sent it because she wanted the place inside my head. I was not going to give her that much power. “Maya,” I said when she answered from upstairs, “keep the pediatric door locked. Noah stays with you. Matteo stays where the nurses can see him. Nobody moves either of them because I leave this floor.” “What are you doing?” “Checking a photograph.” She heard what I did not say. Maya always did. “You call if the building shifts under you.” “I will.” I ended the call before anyone could turn it into permission. Dante was still at the chapel door. He saw the picture in my hand and his face went still in the way it did when anger wanted to become an order. “West Wing has been closed for years,” he said. “Then it has had years to hide what my father left there.” “Elena—” “You stay at the stairwell.” I pointed through the lobby toward the old service hall. “You do not come in. You do not touch anything I find. You hold that door if anyone tries to use it behind me.” His eyes met mine. It was not trust. It was a boundary with his name on it. “I can do that,” he said. “Do only that.” The old wing began past a fire door that had been painted over so many times the metal looked padded. The latch gave under my shoulder with a groan that raised dust from the floor. Cold, trapped air poured over my face. Behind me, Dante took his place at the open door. He did not follow. The hallway was nothing like the bright pediatric floor above us. Half the ceiling lights were dead. The ones that worked blinked over green tiles and old wheelchair marks. Rain struck the boarded windows hard enough to make the corridor flinch. I found the sign from Vittoria’s picture at the far end. WEST WING—ROOM FOUR. The arrow beneath it pointed toward a service stairwell, not a patient room. Of course it did. My father had spent his life looking behind the signs powerful people put up for everyone else. The stairwell door was chained, but the chain had rusted loose from one side of the frame. I could have walked back. I could have told myself a photograph from Vittoria was bait and left the bait where it belonged. Then I saw a brown strip caught beneath the bottom link. Not the sleeve from Room Four. This was only a torn paper edge, softened by damp and darkened with age. G. VALE. My throat closed. I crouched and slid my fingers under the chain. The loose bracket scraped free, and the door swung inward too fast. I caught it before it slammed, but my palm hit the corroded edge. Pain flashed bright and immediate. Blood dotted the heel of my hand. The first step below creaked when I put my weight on it. The second tilted. I kept going anyway. “Elena?” Dante’s voice came from above, distant but sharp. “Stay there.” The landing smelled of wet plaster and old antiseptic. A section of the wall had buckled beside a narrow service room. The door carried no number now, only the pale rectangle where one had been ripped away. But the photograph had caught the corner of it. A chipped green tile. A bent pipe. The same service door, half open behind my father’s shoulder. Room Four. I pushed inside. The room had been stripped down to a rusted sink and a metal cabinet bolted to the wall. Someone had smashed the cabinet lock years ago. Inside were empty shelves, a nest of gray paper, and nothing else. For one ugly second, I hated myself for coming. Vittoria had given me a room full of dust and watched me run to it. Maybe that was the whole cruelty. Make the daughter search a corpse of a place while the woman who knew more kept the answers in her pocket. Then a drop of water hit the floor beside my shoe. I looked up. Above the cabinet, the ceiling plaster had broken open around an old vent. Something brown was wedged behind the grate. I dragged the cabinet away from the wall. Its feet screamed over the tile. The top bucked under my hands, and for a heartbeat I thought it would come down on me. I shoved harder, caught the balance, and climbed onto it before I could talk myself out of it. The grate was held by two screws. One came loose. The other cut into my already bleeding palm when it snapped free. I hooked two fingers into the dark space and pulled. A small brown audit box slid out against my wrist. My father’s handwriting covered the lid. GABRIEL VALE. MAY 12. Not a name in a ledger. Not a ghost somebody else had arranged for me to mourn. He had put this here himself. The cabinet shifted beneath my feet. I jumped down hard, the box locked against my ribs. Pain shot through my ankle, but I stayed upright. Across the landing, the old stair door banged once in the wind. “Elena?” Dante called again. “I’m coming out.” I did not open the box until I was back in the service room with the broken wall at my back. Not because Dante had earned the right to see it. Because I had earned the right not to fall through a rotten floor while I learned what my father had died protecting. The lid stuck. I dug my thumbnail under the warped edge and pulled. Inside lay a brown sleeve, a pencil stub, and a single thin folder beneath them. I did not touch the folder at first. My name was not on its tab. Noah’s was. NOAH VALE — SYMPTOM PREDICTION — PRE-BIRTH.