Her husband knew their unborn son was in distress—yet when his lieutenant begged him to come home, Lucian looked at his mistress and whispered, “Not yet.”

The fluorescent lights of the trauma corridor flashed overhead in an agonizing, rhythmic blur.

Serena gripped the metal guardrails of the gurney so hard her knuckles turned chalk-white. A contraction tore through her abdomen, sharp and tearing, unlike anything she had read about in the medical manuals. It felt like her body was turning inside out.

"Fetal heart tones dropping to eighty!" a nurse yelled, running alongside the cart. "Seventy-five! We're losing the tracing!"

"Push ten of terbutaline!" Dr. Katherine’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp and authoritative. She leaned over Serena, her mask pulled down for a brief second to offer human connection. "Serena, look at me. Look at my eyes."

Serena gasped, tears streaming into her hairline, soaking the paper pillow beneath her. "My baby... Katherine, please... save my boy..."

"I'm going to get him out, Serena. But we cannot wait for an epidural. We have to put you under general anesthesia right now. The placenta is abruping."

Beside the gurney, Elena ran in soaked sneakers, her hands clutching Serena’s free hand. "I called him, Rena! I called his satellite line! Vance answered—he said he’d tell him!"

Serena’s gaze drifted toward the heavy double doors of the surgical suite. Beyond those doors lay the cold, sterile void where she would be put to sleep. And in the hallway behind them, where a husband, a protector, a father was supposed to stand, there was only empty air and the smell of antiseptic.

She remembered the silver music box sitting on the nursery shelf in their empty mansion. *For my little prince. Love, Dad.*

A bitter, salty laugh caught in her throat between wracking sobs.

"He's not coming, Elena," Serena whispered. Her voice was cracked, devoid of hope, stripped bare of five years of devotion. "He was never coming."

"Sign here, Mrs. Vance," a surgical assistant thrust a clipboard into her shaking hand. "Consent for emergency surgical intervention and full life-support protocol."

The pen shook in her fingers. Blood smeared the lower right corner of the document from an IV line that had blown in her wrist. Serena signed her maiden name: *Serena Cole.*

Not Vance. Never Vance again.

As they wheeled her under the glaring circular lamps of Operating Room 4, the anesthesiologist pressed a clear plastic mask over her nose and mouth.

"Take deep breaths, Serena. Count backward from ten."

"Ten," she whispered into the cold plastic. Her eyelids grew heavy as lead. *Please God, let him live. Take everything else. Take my life, take my marriage, take my soul. Just let my baby breathe.*

"Nine..."