All Chapters of The Paralyzed Billionaire and his nurse: A love story: Chapter 11 - Chapter 16

NATHANIEL's POV Forty-eight hours.In the world of trauma, forty-eight hours is the difference between a rescue and a recovery. To the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, I was a grieving billionaire.To the news outlets, the story of the "Sun King’s Nurse" was a viral sensation—a tragic tale of a gold-digger who met a dark end in a foreign land.But to me, the world had ceased to exist.I sat in the back of the mobile command unit parked at the edge of the Okutama Reservoir.My eyes were bloodshot, fixed on the sonar screens as divers combed the silt-heavy depths. We had found the blood on the concrete pier.My blood. Because she was mine, and they had spilled her like she was nothing."Sir," Miller said, his voice hesitant. "The Japanese authorities... they want to scale back the search.The currents are too strong. If she went in there two days ago, the likelihood of finding a body is—""I don't want to hear about likelihoods!" I roared, slamming my fist onto the console. The H.I.S. interf

ELIZA (Ava’s Mother)The clock on the kitchen wall ticked like a metronome, counting down the seconds of a life that no longer made sense.I sat at the small wooden table, my hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had long since gone cold.Outside the window of the penthouse Nathaniel had given us, the Los Angeles skyline was shimmering and bright—a cruel contrast to the darkness that had moved into my chest."Eliza, please. You have to eat something."I looked up at my husband, Thomas. He looked a decade older than he had a week ago.His eyes were bloodshot, his shoulders slumped as if he were physically carrying the weight of the sky."I can't, Tom," I whispered. "Every time I swallow, I feel like I'm choking on the air she should be breathing."The television in the living room was muted, but the images were inescapable.A picture of our Ava—smiling, her hair windblown from a day at the beach—flickered next to a headline that read: RECOVERY EFFORTS CEASE IN TOKYO."She was just doi

NATHANIEL'S POV Time in the Okutama wilderness didn't move in the blurred, high-octane seconds of a racetrack. It moved in the slow drip of rain from cedar eaves and the agonizingly gradual re-knitting of nerve endings.We had been "dead" for precisely four months. To the world, Nathaniel King was a charred memory at the base of a California cliff; to me, life had been reduced to the four walls of Sato’s hut and the woman who refused to let me surrender to the gravity of my own body.I stood in the center of the room, my bare feet gripping the cold wood.I wasn't using the chair, and for the first time today, I wasn't using the parallel bars I’d designed for Sato to bolt into the floorboards."Don't look at your feet, Nathan," Ava said. Her voice was a soft anchor in the quiet. "Look at me.Your brain knows where the floor is. Trust the mapping we’ve done."I lifted my gaze. Ava stood three feet away, her honey-brown hair pulled back in a loose braid, wearing an oversized flannel shi