The Heiress He Underestimated novel Chapter 46

Chapter 46 A Promise

She found herself walking back across the room and settling into a large, comfortable chair near his bed. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything. Tell me about your day before I tried to die.”

“You didn’t try to die. Your immune system tried to kill you. There’s a difference.

“Semantics,” he murmured, a faint smile on his lips, his eyes closed again but his attention fully on her.

Elera looked at the last of the sunset bleeding from the sky. She couldn’t talk about the other parts of her day–the coded message from her publisher, the design approvals for the spring collection, the quiet alert from Frost about a new, more sophisticated probe on the Nethys Medical servers, likely from Lyra.

So she talked about the only thing they truly shared, outside of sickness and strategy. “I finished running a secondary simulation today. A variation on the Chimera Protocol’s second phase. The results were promising. A seventy–two percent probability of successful cellular integration.”

“Seventy–two percent,” he repeated softly. “Better odds than I had yesterday.”

“Much better.”

He was quiet for a long moment. The only sound was the soft whisper of the ocean and the rhythmic beep of the portable monitor tracking his steady, if slow, heartbeat.

“I finished a book yesterday,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the dim room. “Before the fever took over.”

“Oh?” she asked, leaning her head back against the chair. “Something for the board? A gripping treatise on tax law?”

A genuine chuckle escaped him, though it was weak and ended in a slight cough. “No. Fiction. I told you about it. Ghost of the Glass.”

Elera’s breath hitched. She was glad he wasn’t looking at her. She kept her voice carefully neutral. “Right. The thriller. Did you like it?”

“I loved it,” he said simply. “I’ve read everything Raven Shadowmere has ever written. She is a… a peculiar genius. Her protagonists are always people living dual lives and carrying immense secrets. They’re brilliant, but also profoundly lonely. There’s a line in this one… “The truth was a cathedral she had built inside her own mind, a place so vast and holy that she dared not let anyone else enter, for fear they would desecrate it with their small understanding.“” He opened his eyes and looked at her. The twilight pa his face in soft blues and grays. “It’s how I’ve felt for years. Since the diagnosis. Since Lyra left. Since walls started closing in.”

Elera’s throat was tight. She had written that line in a fugue state at three in the morning, years ago, after a failed surgery had left a child dead on her table. She had never told a soul what it meant. To hear him quote it back to her, to hear it resonate so deeply with his own private pain, was unnerving.

“It’s just a book,” she managed to say.

“It’s never just a book,” he countered softly. “Not when it feels like the author has crawled inside your skull and written down your thoughts.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. The silence stretched, comfortable but charged.

“I have a wish,” he said after a while, his gaze drifting back to the darkening window. “A selfish one.”

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