Warm My Bed, Brother-in-law Chapter 4: Chapter 4: A Placeholder.

Read chapter 4 of Warm My Bed, Brother-in-law by PayalSinghRajput on NovelPedia.

ELENA - POV. The door to the restroom swung shut. I walked over to the sink, turned on the tap, and cupped the cold water in my hands. I splashed it over my face three times, trying to stop the shaking in my limbs. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were red, and my face looked pale, but my skin still felt incredibly sensitive. I leaned my hands on the edge of the sink and forced myself to breathe. I am thirty-five years old. My husband was lying behind double doors, fighting for his life, and yet my pulse was racing because of how Damian had held me in the hallway. What is wrong with you? I demanded my reflection. Your husband was just shot, and you are standing here shivering like a teenager because his twisted brother put his hands on you? I gripped the edges of the sink until my knuckles turned white. It’s just adrenaline , I argued back against my own panic. It's just a shock. It doesn't mean anything. You hate him. You loathe everything he stands for. But the memory of Damian's hands still burned around my wrists, and I felt disgusted with myself. It had been three years since Richard had last touched me. Three years of separate bedrooms, empty nights, and cold dinners. I told myself that my body was just starved for human contact. The sudden proximity, the grip of his hands on my wrists, the scent of him… it was just a physical reaction to another person during a high-stress moment. It didn't mean anything. Right? It couldn't. I took a deep breath, straightened my cashmere sweater, and walked out to find Dr. Hassan. Dr. Hassan led me into his office, and I sat down in one of the leather chairs. He didn't waste time. He sat across from me and laid out the facts in a calm, flat tone. “The surgery managed to stop the bleeding, Mrs. Vitale,” Dr. Hassan said, looking straight at me. “But your husband suffered a cardiac arrest on the table. His brain went without oxygen for several minutes. Right now, he is in a medically induced coma. We need to keep him under to control the swelling and lower his brain's demand for oxygen.” I hesitated before asking. "When will he wake up?" "We don't know," the doctor replied. "We will keep him under for the next seventy-two hours to let the swelling peak and subside. Once we taper off the medication, we’ll know. Right now, we just have to wait." I nodded slowly, my throat too tight to speak. "Can I see him?" "Yes. He is in Room 402. But it will be difficult to look at him. He is on a ventilator." “Thank you,” I said, rising on my numb feet and left the doctor’s room. … My heart pounded with every step toward the ICU. I wasn't ready to see Richard like this, but I knew I had to. When I pushed the glass door open, Richard looked smaller than I had ever seen him. There were tubes in his mouth, IV lines in both arms, and a massive machine whooshing beside his bed, forcing air into his lungs. I walked over and took his hand. It was warm, but his fingers were completely limp. I stared at his face, trying to process the sight of him like this. The cold numbness from earlier was still there, but beneath it, the love I had for him hadn't changed. It couldn't. We had grown distant over the past few years, and the silence between us in the penthouse had become a wall, but he was still my husband. He was still the man I had chosen, the one I had sworn to be loyal to. That loyalty wasn't something I could just switch off because things had gotten hard or lonely. I loved him, and seeing him broken like this made my chest ache. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted us to fix whatever we had lost, because the thought of a life without him entirely was terrifying. Wake up, Richard. Please. I pleaded silently, staring at his closed eyelids. Don't leave me alone in this cruel world. I squeezed his hand, wishing he could squeeze it back, but he didn’t. I was still holding his hand when I heard the door open behind me. I turned around, expecting a nurse. Instead, my father-in-law, Nikolai Vitale, walked int