The machines had learned her breathing better than he had.

Elliot DeLuca sat beside the hospital bed, spine straight, shoulders squared—the posture of a man who had negotiated billion-dollar deals and broken empires with a single sentence. His hand wrapped around Isabella’s, careful, reverent, as if holding her too tightly might steal what little time remained.

Months.

It had been months since the word incurable entered his vocabulary and refused to leave.

At first, he had laughed. A sharp, humorless sound in a room full of doctors who avoided his eyes. There was always a solution. There was always a price. Elliot DeLuca had built his life on that truth. He bought the best specialists from three continents, experimental treatments hidden behind legal walls, research labs that moved at his command. He rewrote schedules, laws, ethics—anything that could bend.

But the illness did not bend.

Money became meaningless in this room. Influence dissolved under fluorescent lights. Power stopped at the edge of her bed.

Isabella lay pale against white sheets, lashes resting softly against her skin. She looked smaller like this, as if the sickness had been quietly folding her inward. Each rise of her chest was shallow, measured, assisted. Elliot memorized it anyway, terrified of missing one.

“You’re awake,” he said softly, as if speaking louder might scare her away.

Her fingers twitched in his grasp. Weak—but there.

“I’m here,” he continued, lips curving into a smile he had practiced in mirrors, elevators, reflections of dark glass at night. “I told you I would be.”

The smile stayed. It always did. Even when something inside him screamed.

Doctors had warned him about this moment. Prepare yourself. As if preparation existed for watching the only person who ever dismantled him piece by piece fade away. As if there were strategies for grief. Elliot had searched for them anyway—read studies at three in the morning, analyzed patterns of loss like they were market failures he could correct.

He failed every time.