Catherine quietly slipped back into Maximilian's ICU room.
For a long moment, she simply stood by the doorway.
The machines continued their steady rhythm, the monitor tracing gentle green waves across the screen, but everything else remained painfully still.
The doctors called it resting.
She still couldn't bring herself to believe it. Silence had never suited Maximilian.
In her previous life, he had been the infuriating prince who had grown up beside her, forever finding ways to unsettle her heart before becoming the terrifying king who stood against the entire continent.
In this life, he had somehow become even more impossible to ignore. He appeared everywhere—lecturing students with infuriating confidence, stealing her attention whenever she buried herself in research, quietly solving problems before she even realized they existed, and spoiling her with such shameless devotion that she'd gradually forgotten what it felt like to stand entirely on her own.
