جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 90

Quin's POVI knew something was wrong.But the problem was that nobody would tell me what it was.I woke up before Tyler the next morning, which wasn’t unusual. My first thought was him. I rolled onto my side and studied his sleeping face.Tyler was curled beneath the blankets, one arm tucked under the pillow,his beautiful hair a complete disaster. It still looked soft. I resisted the urge to brush it back from his forehead.Barely.Last night had bothered me more than I wanted to admit. Tyler wasn’t a good liar—at least not with me. He thought he was. He tried hard. But I’d memorized every tell: the slight tightening at the corner of his mouth, the way his voice pitched just a fraction higher, the way he avoided making eye contact for half a second too long.And last night his eyes were screaming that something was obviously wrong. I tried to think if I'd done something wrong without realising it but no, it wasn't about us. So he was helping someone keep a secret that was bothering h

Quin's POV"Who is dying?" I finally managed to find my voice.The word Dying was doing things to my brain in the wrong way. The word had no business anywhere near her.Not Billie, the woman who had practically raised me when our parents were too busy, who called me every week just to annoy me, the force of nature who could walk into any room and have everyone laughing within minutes.This wasn’t real.It couldn’t be.“Quin…” Billie called me again..I took a step back. Then another. I wasn’t even aware I was moving until my back hit the wall.Tyler looked like he wanted to speak, but for once, words failed him.Good. Because I had none either.My chest felt too tight. Like my lungs had forgotten how to work.“How long?” I finally rasped.Billie lowered her gaze. “Several months.”Several months.Which means she's been living with the pain all along. And here I thought her husband was the issue.“Several months?” The laugh that tore out of me was short, ugly, and broken. “Several mont

Quin's POVI watched my parents in silence after Billie told them.The words still hung in the air like smoke after an explosion—thick, acrid, impossible to breathe through. For a long moment, no one moved. The penthouse, usually a fortress of controlled elegance, felt like it had been hollowed out.My mother stared at Billie as if the English language had suddenly betrayed her. Her lips parted, but nothing came out. Denial flickered across her face, bright and fragile, before reality began to crush it.My father looked worse.Much worse.William McKenzie had built an empire on composure. He negotiated billion-dollar deals with the calm of a man ordering coffee. He stared down hostile boardrooms and market crashes without flinching. But right now, the indestructible William McKenzie was gone.He looked only at his daughter. His dying daughter."No," he said finally. The single word scraped out, raw and hoarse.Billie lowered her gaze to her lap, fingers twisting together."That's not

Quin's POVThe ambulance ride was the longest journey of my life.I sat wedged beside the stretcher, gripping Billie’s hand so tightly my fingers had gone numb. Her skin felt cool, too fragile, like it might bruise under the pressure. She still hadn’t woken up. The paramedics moved with brisk efficiency around us, speaking rapid Italian into radios while attaching monitors to her chest. The moment they arrived I had told them about her condition. The machines beeped in a steady rhythm that should have been reassuring.Instead, every beep sounded like a countdown.My mother sat across from me, crying silently, tears tracking down her face without sound. My father looked devastated —shoulders hunched, jaw locked, eyes fixed on his daughter as if willing her to open hers. And me? To say I was terrified was an understatement of the year.Death no longer felt like some distant shadow on the horizon. It was here, in this swaying ambulance, in the oxygen mask covering my sister’s face, in th

Quin's POV"No."The word tore from my throat before my brain even caught up. It hung in the sterile air like a challenge, like a plea no one could answer.The doctor kept speaking—his voice low, measured and professional. Nurses moved around the bed with practiced efficiency. Machines hummed and beeped their indifferent rhythm. Somewhere behind me, my mother’s sobs fractured the room. But all of it faded beneath the relentless ringing in my ears.No. No. No. No.This wasn’t happening.Billie was sleeping. That was all. She’d pushed herself too hard, fought too long. She was exhausted and needed to rest. Any second now her eyelids would flutter open, and she’d give me that trademark half-smirk, the one that said she knew exactly how much she’d worried us and didn’t regret a single second of it.I stared at the monitor. At the flat green line that stretched endlessly across the screen.My brain refused to process what my eyes were seeing. Because an hour ago she had been talking—her vo