The Heiress He Underestimated novel Chapter 90

Chapter 90 Game On

Elera felt like he’d slapped her. “Is that really what you think? That I’m just humoring you?”

“I think you’re a woman with twenty billion dollars and multiple successful careers who married a stranger because he made a good pitch,” Drakonius said. “And I think somewhere along the way, you’ve started to confuse partnership with something else. But Elera, I’m dying. Even with your treatment, even with the Chimera Protocol working, I’m on borrowed time. And I won’t let you waste your feelings on someone who has an expiration date.”

“You don’t get to decide that,” Elera said, anger flaring now. “You don’t get to tell me what I feel or why I feel it.”

“Then tell me,” Drakonius challenged. “Tell me honestly. If I wasn’t sick, if I wasn’t this tragic figure you’re trying to save, would you still be here? Would you have even looked twice at me?”

It was a trap question and they both knew it. If she said yes, he wouldn’t believe her. If she said no, she’d be confirming his worst fears.

“I don’t deal in hypotheticals,” Elera said instead. “You are sick. I am trying to save you. That’s our reality. And in that reality, I’ve come to care about you as more than a patient or a partner. But clearly, you’ve already decided what I feel and why I feel it, so this conversation is pointless.”

She stood up, needing to get out of this room before she said something she’d regret.

“Elera, wait,” Drakonius said, but she was already at the door.

“I have work to do,” she said without turning around. “The Chimera Protocol needs monitoring. Your cells don’t care about our relationship drama. They just need fixing.”

She left before he could respond, her vision blurring with tears she refused to let fall. This was ridiculous. They were both ridiculous. Two intelligent people completely failing at basic communication.

She made it to her lab and threw herself into work. Numbers and cells and genetic sequences didn’t have feelings. They didn’t misunderstand or assume or project. They just were. It was comforting in its simplicity.

But even as she lost herself in the data, her mind kept circling back to Drakonius’s words. He thought she was staying out of pity. He thought the kiss was for showcasing. He thought she was too kind for her own good, wasting her feelings on a dying man.

He had no idea.

She wasn’t staying because she pitied him. She was staying because the thought of leaving, of not seeing him every day, of not hearing his dry humor or watching him light up when he talked about books, was physically painful.

She didn’t kiss him out of kindness. She kissed him because she wanted to, because she’d been thinking about it for days, because being near him made her feel alive in a way nothing else did. And she was slowly realizing her feelings for him.

And she wasn’t wasting her feelings. She was investing them in someone who was absolutely worth it, terminal illness or not.

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