The Love I Begged For Was Never Real novel Chapter 317

"You call these minor injuries?"

Nora's voice was thick with emotion. As she stared at his buttoned hospital gown, the gruesome image of his mangled flesh still flashed before her eyes. "Something that heavy crashed down on you. Those wounds were so deep they tore right through your muscle. Weren't you afraid you were going to die in there?"

"The scars will fade in time. You don't need to feel sorry for me."

"You are an absolute lunatic."

Nora cursed at him through her tears.

"Yes, I am a lunatic."

Gideon went along with her words, his tone incredibly soft. "And right now, this lunatic is thirsty. Mrs. Hayes, would you mind grabbing me a glass of water?"

Nora hastily wiped the tears from her face, stood up from the edge of the bed, and walked over to the water dispenser.

Leaning back against the hospital bed's custom pillows, Gideon fixed his sharp, intense gaze on her red eyes.

The arrogant, overbearing presence he usually carried vanished entirely in that moment. He turned his head slightly and let out a soft sigh.

"Come closer."

His voice was low and gravelly, laced with the weakness of a man recovering from near-death. His tone held a peacefulness that Nora had rarely ever heard from him.

Hesitating for a couple of seconds, Nora took the glass of water, forced her stiff legs to move, and sat down in the visitor's chair beside the bed.

"Don't worry, I'm tough to kill. I suppose the Grim Reaper realized he couldn't handle me and sent me right back."

Hearing his fearless joke, she bit down hard on her lower lip.

She stared fixedly at his pale, bloodless face, unable to muster even a hint of a smile.

Gideon wasn't used to seeing her look so utterly devastated, as if she were carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. More than that, he refused to let her shoulder all the blame for this accident.

He spoke in a rare, casual tone, even attempting to offer her some comfort.

"Honestly, these injuries really mean nothing to me."

Everyone kept their mouths tightly shut about it, and no one dared breathe a word of it in front of Gideon.

Yet his tone was incredibly flat, as if he were reading aloud a story about a stranger.

"When my grandfather brought me home, I didn't even get to see them one last time."

"I don't remember what they looked like. There isn't even a single clear family portrait left. The only thing I can faintly recall are the hushed words my mother whispered to coax me to sleep when I had a fever as a little boy."

"But the memory is so blurred that later on, I couldn't even tell if it was real or just a hallucination I had fabricated."

Nora sat by the bed, listening to his words. Her fingers gripped tightly at the hem of her shirt. She didn't interrupt, choosing to quietly listen.

"The Hayes family was a massive empire with a tangled web of branch families. The deaths of my parents became a taboo subject, and no one dared mention a syllable to me."

"They were afraid I wouldn't be able to move past the trauma. They were terrified that the sole heir to the Hayes fortune would turn into a lunatic consumed by resentment."

"But you can't stop outsiders from talking. Those so-called relatives from the branch families never cared that I was just a little kid when they gossiped behind my back. An orphan, a jinx, a cursed life... those labels followed me everywhere."