PART 2: Alexander did not answer Marissa immediately. He was too busy trying to understand why the woman who had once stood in his penthouse kitchen barefoot and laughing now looked at him from a hospital bed as if he were someone who could destroy her with one signature. Promise me you won’t take him from me. Those words did not belong between two people who had once whispered about baby names in the dark. They belonged in courtrooms, custody fights, and nightmares. He gripped the back of the chair until his knuckles whitened. “Marissa,” he said carefully, “I don’t even know him yet.” Her eyes closed, as if that sentence hurt and relieved her at the same time. “You’re Alexander Monroe. You don’t have to know someone to own the room they’re standing in.” The truth of that accusation landed too close to his bones. He had spent his life becoming untouchable because poverty, abandonment, and helplessness had once made him feel like prey. He had learned to buy buildings before they could become cages. He had learned to hire lawyers before enemies could write stories about him. He had learned that power was safest when it arrived first. But hearing Marissa say it that way, from a hospital bed with an IV in her arm and his possible son breathing through tubes down the hall, made his power feel less like armor and more like a weapon she expected him to use against her.

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