Kael's POV
It's a been a week.
Seven days of the same low light, the same quiet machines, the same chair pulled so close to the cot that my knees touch the frame.
Seven days of watching his chest rise and fall and counting every interval between one breath and the next like the count itself could keep the next one coming.
Seven days of watching physicians who enter, run their scans, exchange the same careful looks, and then tell me in soft, professional voices that I should prepare for the worst.
But I do not want to prepare for that. I refuse to do so.
The man I used to be; the one who answered summons, who managed the estate's demands, who moved through the complex with clean purpose, has thinned into something narrower and more desperate.
