Chapter 8: Attack

Sienna

The photograph was still in my hand when the pain hit, sudden and enormous, like something inside my chest had simply given up holding its shape. It wasn't like anything I'd felt before, not even in the weeks since Dr. Whitfield's diagnosis, not even in the ache that had been living under my ribs for months. This was different. This felt like dying.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't call out. My hand closed on the blanket instead of Adam's arm, fingers digging into the thin fabric like it might anchor me to something, and the monitor beside me went from its patient steady beeping into something frantic and shrieking, and the last thing I saw before the room tilted sideways was Adam's face going white as he shot up out of his chair shouting for help.

"Something's wrong, get someone in here now!"

After that there was only noise. Hands on me, a mask over my face, a nurse's voice counting something out loud, the door banging open and more footsteps flooding in, and underneath all of it, distant and strange, Adam's voice repeating my name like it was the only word he still had left to hold onto.

I don't know how long it lasted. Long enough that when it finally eased, when my chest unclenched and the machine's shriek dropped back into something almost calm, I was soaked through with sweat and shaking too hard to speak, my whole body still buzzing with the aftershock of whatever had just tried to take me.

The doctor who came to check on me afterward looked younger than I expected, and more shaken than she was probably supposed to let herself look, her hands moving quickly but carefully over the monitor readouts as though she needed to double-check them against what her instincts were already telling her. "Your heart went into an arrhythmia. We managed to stabilize you, but Mrs. Hart, whatever's going on with your heart, this wasn't caused by the accident alone. This has been building for some time."

I didn't say anything. I didn't need to. Something in my face must have told her everything, because she studied me for a long moment and then asked, more gently, "You already knew, didn't you. Before tonight."

"Yes." My voice came out thin. "A week ago. Before the accident."

Adam went very still in the corner of the room.

"You knew," he said, and this time there was no anger in it at all, just something hollowed out and disbelieving, like he was watching a second wound open up in front of him before the first had even finished bleeding. "You knew, and you told no one. You were driving alone at night with a heart that could stop at any moment, and not one person was watching out for you."

"There was no one to tell." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to, the weight of that truth settling on me harder than it seemed to settle on him.

He crossed the room and sat down heavily in the chair beside my bed, close enough that I could see his hands weren't quite steady, close enough that I could see the exhaustion carved into his face from two days of sitting in this same chair, waiting for a sister he'd only just found to wake up. "We looked for you for twenty-five years," he said. "Twenty-five years, Sienna. My mother still keeps your christening gown folded in a drawer she won't let anyone else touch. 

Elder brother has spent half his adult life chasing leads that went nowhere, half a world away from home most years, all of it in service of finding you. And now, two days after I finally found you, I nearly watched you die in front of me before I even had the chance to know you."

"Adam—" I started, not entirely sure what I meant to say next, only that his name felt like the only solid thing I had to hold onto in that moment.

"We are not losing you again." His voice cracked on the word again, raw in a way that made it impossible to doubt. "Not to a heart condition, not to a car accident, not to anything. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, we are going to fix this. I don't care what it takes. I have already lost twenty-five years I can't get back. I am not losing one more day."

The doctor cleared her throat gently, glancing between the two of us like she was choosing her words as carefully as she could manage. "Given what just happened, I have to be honest with you both. Her heart is far more unstable than we initially thought. If she has another episode like that one without immediate intervention..."

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. The silence that followed said everything the medical terminology hadn't.

Adam's jaw tightened, and when he spoke again his voice had gone flat and decisive, the voice of a man reorganizing his entire life in real time, already three steps ahead of the conversation the rest of us were still having. "Then we don't wait for a transport window. I'm calling my father tonight. We move her the moment she's stable enough to fly, and if this hospital can't guarantee that stability, I will find one that can, anywhere in the world, tonight if I have to."

I opened my mouth to argue, out of habit more than conviction, some old instinct telling me I wasn't allowed to be this much trouble to anyone, and my heart chose that exact moment to stutter once, hard, against my ribs, a warning shot that silenced whatever I'd been about to say before I'd even found the words.

Adam saw it happen on the monitor before I even felt it fully. His face went white all over again, all the earlier resolve momentarily giving way to plain fear.

"Get her prepped," he said to the nurse, not taking his eyes off me. "We're not waiting for another one of those to decide this."