The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 466

Chapter 229-1

+25 Points

I haven’t slept in three days. Not real sleep. Just fitful, thirty–minute blips of dark, dreamless exhaustion that leave my head throbbing and my mouth tasting of copper and salt.

Despite Jade and Willow moving in with me, the quiet of the penthouse is terrifying. It’s a stifling background to an endless waiting game.

Every hour that passes feels like a physical erosion. My skin feels papery and thin; my sweater hangs too loosely off my shoulders.

Stitch’s IV bruises on my arm have turned a dull, greenish–yellow, but I don’t care about the bruises. I don’t care about the cold, fresh–squeezed orange juice Jade keeps placing in my hands.

I care about one thing, and one thing only. A heartbeat miles away, one that I can no longer hear.

I walk into the living room, my bare feet dragging across the polished parquet floor.

Willow is sitting in the center of the room, bathed in the pale morning sun pouring through the high arched windows.

She’s enveloped in a cloud of soft grey linen, sitting cross–legged on a woven rug surrounded by small ceramic dishes of dried herbs, a cluster of unlit beeswax candles, and a velvet–wrapped bundle resting in her lap. The faint, clean scent of crushed dried sage and dried roses hangs in the air around her.

She looks up as I enter. Her eyes are calm, liquid, and entirely unhurried, reflecting the morning sky like still water.

“Zara,” she says softly, her voice a soothing breeze in the quiet. “I thought about your request.”

“It wasn’t a request,” I say sharply. “Do it.”

I cross the floor, dropping to my knees right across from her, my hands shaking so violently that my knuckles knock against a ceramic dish.

“Zara, slow down-”

“No, Willow, please.” I grab her wrist, my fingers digging into her soft skin, my eyes wide and bloodshot as I stare at her. “Read my palm. Read the cards. Do a tea reading, pull the runes, send out an aura, cast the stones… I don’t care what you do. Just tell me if his heart is still beating.”

Willow doesn’t pull her wrist away. She just looks at me, her gaze piercing right through the panic, right through the dark circles under my eyes, straight into the terrified core of my soul.

“Zara,” she murmurs gently. “Listen…”

“Willow, please,” I beg, the word tearing out of my throat like a sob. I drop her wrist and grab her hands. ‘I’m losing my mind. I can’t feel him. Usually, I can feel him in the back of my head: his weight, his anger, his warmth. His love.”

I take a deep, shuddering breath.

“Right now, there’s nothing, it’s just cold air. I need you to look into the veil and tell me he’s alive. You have

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