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 Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was kept under strict, reverent silence.

Because of Marcus’s legal injunction, Lucian was barred from entering the recovery suite. But through a frantic, behind-the-scenes threat to the hospital board of directors, his attorneys had managed to secure a single, ten-minute supervised view of his son through the external observation glass.

Lucian stood in the darkened viewing gallery, his hands pressed flat against the soundproof pane.

Inside, in a clear plastic incubator surrounded by a maze of blinking screens and thin plastic tubes, lay his son.

The infant wore a tiny blue knitted cap. A cooling blanket wrapped his miniature torso, and an intravenous line the size of a thread ran into a tiny vein on his scalp. He looked impossibly small—smaller than Lucian’s two hands combined.

"His name is Julian," a quiet voice spoke beside him.

Lucian turned his head. Dr. Katherine stood there in surgical scrubs, her arms crossed over her chest, looking exhausted.

"Julian," Lucian repeated, the name tasting like ash and iron on his tongue. "Is he... is he going to have brain damage from the oxygen deprivation?"

"We don't know yet," Katherine replied bluntly. "We're doing seventy-two hours of cooling therapy to prevent secondary swelling. He has a strong heart, Lucian. He fought like a lion to stay here. But Serena almost didn't make it off that table."

Lucian flinched, looking back at the tiny boy in the crib. "I didn't think... I didn't realize it was that severe..."

"You didn't care to know," Katherine cut him off mercilessly. "Serena lost nearly two liters of blood. When she was going under, she wasn't asking for painkillers. She wasn't asking for God. She was asking for you. And when you didn't answer, something died inside her before the anesthesia even touched her veins."

Katherine turned to walk away.

"Wait," Lucian choked out, his voice cracking with the first genuine sob he had uttered in twenty years. "Can I touch him? Just once? Just his hand?"

Katherine looked at him with cold, clinical pity.