Bai Qi's head snapped upward, the vertebrae of his neck popping with the violent suddenness of a man facing the gallows. He scrambled to his feet, staggering forward on leaden legs.
The lead doctor stood there, his surgical gown dampened by the sweat of a literal war for a soul. He looked at George first, seeing the silent plea in the older man's emerald eyes—eyes that were now fractured windows into a crumbling psyche.
Then, the doctor's gaze shifted to the wreck that was Bai Qi.
Bai Qi lunged, his blood-stained fingers digging into the doctor's shoulders like talons.
"How?" his voice was a jagged rasp. "Tell me he is whole. If you utter a single syllable of a curse—if you tell me he is.... he couldn't finish the sentence"gone"—I will personally dismantle every stone of this hospital over your head."
The doctor, hardened by decades of death, roughly shrugged off the billionaire's grip. "Listen to me," he commanded, his voice cold and clinical. "The patient was already fragile. His constitution was paper-thin before the toxin ever touched his lips."
Bai Qi's eyes welled with the frantic, messy tears of a terrified child. His heart didn't just beat; it lurched, a wounded animal trapped in the cage of his ribs. Beside him, George's posture narrowed, his entire being condensing into a singular effort to keep from shattering in public.
"What did I just say?" Bai Qi's lower lip trembled with a violent, seismic force. He snarled, the threat of his power a hollow, desperate shield. "If you fail him, I will see every career in this wing incinerated. You will never hold a scalpel again!"
The doctor didn't flinch. Instead, he bowed his head, a gesture of solemnity that felt like a death sentence. Bai Qi's hand migrated from the doctor's shoulder to the lapel of his own coat, clutching the fabric so tightly the threads groaned.
"Please," Bai Qi whispered, the 'Monarch' dissolving into a beggar. "I am begging you. Tell me nothing's going happen to him."
The doctor looked at him, pity finally flickering in his eyes. "The Belladonna ravaged his nervous system. It was a calculated, brutal assault on his vitals." He took a sharp breath. "His heart stopped twice."
The world didn't just crumble for Bai Qi; it vaporized.
George, a man built of marble and stoicism, turned his back. He couldn't hear more. He couldn't witness the desecration of the boy he had failed to protect. He walked a few paces away, his shoulders shaking with the suppressed tremors of a man whose world had just been robbed of its only light.
But Bai Qi's grief was loud. It was a roar of denial. He grabbed the doctor by the collar, hoisting the man nearly off the floor. "You bastard! You are paid to be a god! What were you doing in there? Why did his heart stop?!"
"Sir, please—"
"TELL ME NOTHING HAPPENED!" Bai Qi screamed, his voice echoing through the sterile corridor like a physical blow. "Tell me he is coming back to me!"
The doctor's voice dropped to a funereal whisper. "He is in a coma."
The word hit Bai Qi with the force of a high-speed collision. His eyes widened, glazed with a terrifying, manic clarity. "A coma? Comas are just sleep. He's sleeping, isn't he? He'll wake up. He's just... he's resting because I tired him out. Tell me I am right.
The doctor lowered his gaze, unable to meet the madness in Bai Qi's eyes. "We don't know. The next forty-eight hours are the threshold. If he does not cross back into consciousness within that window..."
He stopped, the silence more lethal than the words.
"Then what?" Bai Qi barked, his voice climbing an octave of pure panic. "If he doesn't wake up, what happens?"
The doctor gently pried Bai Qi's fingers from his coat. He stepped back, a shadow passing over his face as he walked past the broken King.
"Then," the doctor said, his voice trailing off into the sterile air, "we are sorry."
The word 'sorry' was a grenade.
George sank. He didn't just sit; he collapsed into a metal waiting chair, his hand flying to his face to stifle a sob that sounded like bone breaking.
His emerald eyes were bloodshot, his mouth quivering with the indignity of a grief he couldn't control. A man of his stature, falling so completely—it was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
Bai Qi, however, felt the floor vanish. The polished linoleum became a void. He fell to his knees, his lungs seizing. He couldn't breathe. Every inhale felt like swallowing shards of glass. The atmosphere had been sucked out of the room, leaving only the ringing echo of the doctor's finality. Then we are sorry.
Time ceased to be linear. It became a stagnant pool of salt and regret.
Suddenly, the heavy double doors creaked open. A nurse emerged, her face weary. She froze when she saw the figure on the floor. Bai Qi scrambled toward her, his movements primal and uncoordinated. The nurse gasped, recoiling in fear. To her, this wasn't the prestigious Bai Qi Rothenberg; this was a specter of madness.
"Can I..." Bai Qi's voice was a fractured ghost of itself. "Can I see him? Please. Just for a second. I need to tell him something."
The nurse looked down at the ruined man. The arrogance was gone. The 'Monarch' was a heap of tattered silk and weeping wounds. She nodded slowly, her voice trembling. "But sir... stay back. The tubes... there are so many. He is... he is so weak. Don't touch the lines."
Bai Qi didn't wait for her to finish the warning. He lunged forward, his body moving toward the door with the desperation of a man running back into a burning house to save the only thing he ever truly owned.
He pushed the door open. The air inside the ICU was different—colder, humming with the mechanical rhythm of the ventilator.
Shu Yao looked like a fallen angel. He was drowned in a sea of white linens and plastic tubing. The sight was a visceral laceration to Bai Qi's soul. The boy's skin was the color of winter moonlight, so pale it was almost translucent.
The ventilator hissed—a rhythmic, robotic breath that was the only thing standing between Shu Yao and the grave. Every hiss-thump was a reminder that Bai Qi had stolen the boy's ability to breathe for himself.
Bai Qi approached the bed, his shoes clicking softly on the floor, a sound that felt like a sacrilege in the presence of such fragile life. He stood at the edge of the bed, his hands hovering over the guardrails, trembling so violently he had to grip the cold metal to stay upright.
The boy didn't move. There was no flicker of an eyelid, no twitch of a finger. He was miles away, wandering in a dark, silent corridor where Bai Qi's voice was just a distant, unimportant noise.
Bai Qi looked at the monitor—the jagged green line of the heart rate. It was the only proof that the boy who had waited for him for years was still in the room.
Bai Qi moved toward the bed with the erratic, jerking steps of a marionette with severed strings.
The closer he got to the sterile white island where Shu Yao lay, the more the air seemed to thicken with the scent of ozone and antiseptic.
He reached the bedside and collapsed, his knees hitting the hardwood with a hollow thud that echoed like a mallet on a coffin.
He tried to smile. It was a grotesque, fractured expression—a desperate attempt to project a light strong enough to pull Shu Yao out of the abyssal dark, Bai Qi had pushed him into.
"Shu Yao," he whispered. The name felt alien on his tongue, no longer a command, but a prayer.
His hand hovered over the bedrail, a hair's breadth away from the boy's skin. He shivered, his entire frame racked by tremors so violent they looked like convulsions. He was afraid. For the first time in his life, the King of the Rothenberg empire was paralyzed by a fear that money and blood couldn't silence.
Shu Yao remained deathly still. Those soft, walnut-brown eyes—eyes that had always held a sliver of hope even when Bai Qi was at his most cruel—were sealed shut.
The silence in the room was suffocating, a physical weight pressing against Bai Qi's chest until his own breathing became a jagged, frantic struggle.
"Why aren't you listening to me, Shu Yao?" Bai Qi murmured, his voice cracking into a million jagged shards.
serene, marble-like face. It was the face of someone who had finally found peace by leaving the world behind.
"Whenever I spoke your name... you would respond. Instantly. With that respect... that terrifying, quiet devotion." A single, hot tear tracked through the dried blood on Bai Qi's cheek. "A respect I realize now I never deserved. I don't deserve to even breathe your name."
He tried to force the words past the lump in his throat—a lump made of years of arrogance and three days of unspeakable sin.
"I read it," he choked out, the admission acting as a shackle around his neck. "I read the journal. Every line. Every ink-stroke of your suffering. I read about the day we first met. At the hospital."
He jolted as if an electric current had passed through him, the realization finally solidifying into a physical agony. "I was so stupid. So goddamn blind. I mistook you... I mistook your soul for your sister's. I chased a ghost while the living heart was beating right in front of me."
He tried to stand, his equilibrium shattered. He rose, staggered, and fell back to a crouch, refusing to leave the boy's side. He peered closely at Shu Yao's skin—it was no longer the warm, living alabaster he remembered. it was a cold, translucent white that screamed of the grave.
"Shu Yao? Shu Yao, please."
Nothing. Only the clinical, indifferent beep of the monitors.
A tear fell from Bai Qi's chin, landing squarely on the hollow of Shu Yao's throat. Bai Qi gasped, reaching out with trembling fingers to wipe it away. But the moment his skin brushed against Shu Yao's delicate, bruised throat, he recoiled.
The skin was cold. A deep, bone-chilling cold that made Bai Qi's own heart stop in a sympathetic rhythm of terror.
"Why?" Bai Qi cried, his voice breaking beneath the sound of the machines. "Why did you love me when I gave you nothing? All I ever gave you was suffering."
His fingers traced the curve of Shu Yao's cheek, trying to memorize the contours he had spent years ignoring. He tried to smile again, but the memory of the kitchen—the memory of the hot chocolate and the lethal compliance in Shu Yao's eyes—shattered the mask.
"I don't know how to pay it back," he sobbed, his forehead coming to rest on the edge of the mattress. "I don't know how to undo the sins. Please... this time, I am the one begging. Don't leave me behind.
Bai Qi's eyes were half-lidded, bloodshot and glazed with a devastating fatigue. He looked like a man who had seen the end of the world and realized he was the one who pulled the trigger.
"Teach me," he whispered into the sheets. "Teach me how to be unforgiving. Because I can't live with the version of me that you loved. I am nothing but a monster, and you... you were the only home I ever had."
The weight of his grief finally broke his spine. Bai Qi collapsed forward, his head resting against Shu Yao's motionless chest, sobbing with the visceral, animalistic abandoned of a child who had wandered away from home, only to return and find it collapse.
He had spent his life building an empire of stone and ice, only to realize that the only warmth he ever possessed was currently fading under a thin hospital sheet.
"Don't go," he groaned, his voice a final, dying ember in the sterile room. "Please... don't leave me alone with the man I've become."