"What did he say?" Gaston asked, his chest heaving so violently he could barely form the words.
Lucia only shook her head.
"I cannot… receive treatment?" His voice rasped out in a raw whisper. His eyes, glassy and ringed with purplish hollows, still clung stubbornly to life, burning with a desperate, fevered will.
Lucia's jaw tightened. She had watched the wasting fever consume him overnight, his sheets drenched with sweat by dusk, violent chills by dawn, the hacking cough that painted his lips with flecks of red. His breath carried the sour tang of iron and rot.
The physician had been baffled. The illness should not have advanced so quickly. One day of weakness, and already it had ravaged his lungs. His body's strength, once formidable, had simply crumbled. Perhaps it was the crowd he insisted on mingling with yesterday. Perhaps something far worse.
