Semua Bab Surrogate for my Ex-Fiancé’s Brother: Bab 51 - Bab 60

Teresa's POV I stopped counting the hours somewhere around the second night.Time had collapsed into something smaller and more urgent than hours. It moved in heartbeats instead. Kai's heartbeats, measured on the portable monitor Dr. Green had left on the bedside table, its small screen glowing in the dark while I sat beside my son and watched numbers that should not have been allowed to fluctuate the way they did.Seventy-two. Stable enough to breathe.Sixty-one. My hand would find his wrist automatically.Fifty-four. I would reach for the emergency medication and measure the dose with hands that I forced to stay steady through nothing but will.Three days had passed like this.Master Liu had taught me about the heart long before any medical school had. She had taught me that the heart responded to things science could not always measure. Temperature. Touch. Sound. The specific frequency of a voice that a person trusted completely. I had used everything she taught me, combining it w

Timothy's POV I drove for three hours by myself.Carson had offered to come. Had suggested that arriving with support might be advisable given the circumstances. But I had told him to stay in Dhuran. This was not a situation that required witnesses. This was something I needed to do alone, with the DNA report folded in my jacket pocket and three years of carefully maintained control sitting at the very edge of where I could still manage it.The village looked exactly as it had the first time. Quiet, ordinary, completely indifferent to the fact that it had been hiding my son for three years inside one small cottage at the end of a dirt road.I parked at the edge of the road and walked the rest of the way.The cottage door opened before I reached the gate and Teresa stepped out.She saw me and stopped moving entirely.Every trace of colour left her face in a single moment. Her hand came up and found the doorframe beside her, steadying herself against it, and her eyes locked onto mine

Timothy's POV "We are taking him to Dhuran," I said. "Today."Teresa looked up at me from across the bed. Her eyes were still red at the edges from the yard. But her hands were steady and her voice, when she spoke, was the controlled voice of a woman who had learned to function through things that should have stopped her completely."He doesn't travel well," she whispered. "His heart rate destabilizes with stress and unfamiliar environments trigger…""I have a medical transport vehicle. Equipped. Dr. Green can ride with him. You can ride with him." I held her gaze. "He will be monitored every minute of the journey. I will make sure of it."She looked at me for a moment before she nodded once and turned back to Kai.I stepped out and called Carson.Within twenty minutes the calls were made. The pediatric cardiac center in Dhuran had been notified. The department head, a man who understood that a call from my office meant everything stopped and reorganized immediately, had already begu

Kylie's POV I had known before she said it.I had known the moment I walked through the door and saw his face against the white pillow, pale and still and surrounded by machines. I had known the way I knew things sometimes before I had the words for them.But hearing Teresa say it out loud was different from knowing it silently.It made it real in a way that settled into my chest and stayed there.Kasey was already moving towards the bed slowly. The way he moved when he was going to something he wanted to examine without disturbing. He stopped at the side rail and looked at the boy in the bed for a long moment without speaking.I moved to stand beside him.Up close, the similarities were not… small. They were not the kind of thing you could dismiss as coincidence or explain away as people just looking alike. They were specific and detailed and undeniable in the way that facts were undeniable when you looked at them directly.His nose. The exact curve of it at the tip.The line of his

Timothy's POV The encrypted message arrived at 3 AM on a Tuesday.I was already awake. I had been awake for most of the night, sitting at the desk in the hospital's private office that the administration had made available to me, working through security reports that Carson had sent over at midnight with a note that just said: Read these before morning.And I had read them.Then I had sat with them for two hours and thought about what they meant and what they required and what the appropriate response was to a situation that was escalating in ways I had hoped, until recently, I had successfully prevented.The encrypted channel was one I had closed four years ago. Or believed I had closed. The message that came through it was short and exact in the way that messages from people who did not need to explain themselves tended to be.“The children. All three. Final request before we proceed.”I read it once before I closed the channel, picked up my phone, and called Carson.He answered on