Chapter 201 The Delanos...

Louis Delano stood just beyond the glass wall of the ICU, arms crossed tightly over his chest, as if holding himself together was the only thing keeping him upright.

Inside, she lay unmoving. Serena Kingston.

The only woman he loved, in all certainty.

Beneath the tubes, the wires, the pale sheets and sterile light, she didn’t look like his Serena. Not the woman who once danced barefoot in their kitchen at midnight, laughing with a glass of wine in her hand. Not the woman who kissed him fiercely when she was angry, and held him longer when she was scared. This version of her—still, bruised, breath rattling through a machine—felt impossibly far away.

He had never known such a silence could exist. The kind that stretched between two people when one was slipping from the world and the other was powerless to stop it.

The doctors had spoken earlier, their voices gentle but cautious: “She made it through… for now. The next 24 hours are critical.”

Twenty-four hours. He had replayed those word