No Woman Wanted To Marry The Cruel & Infertile Mafia Boss — Until A Struggling Single Mom Walked In
## Chapter 4
Ruth found the dark stains on a weekend morning — small dried drops leading toward a door at the end of the corridor. She followed them, smelling rubbing alcohol before she reached the room.
He sat before a mirror, bare to the waist, a needle in his scarred left hand, trying to stitch his own shoulder alone, without anesthetic. “Get out,” he said, seeing her in the mirror.
She didn’t. She took the needle from his fingers, washed her hands, cleaned the wound properly, dressed it. When she finished, she took his left hand and gave it two gentle squeezes — the gesture she used with Poppy after every bandage. *It’s over. You did so well.*
“Doesn’t it disgust you?” he asked, dry and low. It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation, a door left open for her to walk through.
“I see an old burn that healed badly,” she said. “You should have received much better treatment back then.” Then she left, not knowing she’d just spoken the kindest words he’d ever heard.
The call came on a Tuesday. An unfamiliar number. “Ruthie.” Her ex-husband Gil, four years gone, asking her to photograph a brown leather ledger from the study’s second drawer, threatening to reopen their old loan debt and send letters straight to the Roland Park gate if she refused. “You have until the end of the week.”
Ruth stood beneath the streetlight a long time before walking home.
On Thursday, a newspaper photograph appeared — August, bare-chested before his mirror, taken secretly through a cracked door, beside an article questioning why a man with no heir should keep his fortune. Ruth rushed to the study, furious, demanding he stop it.
“Three weeks,” he said calmly. “I’ve known for three weeks this article would run. I let it happen because I needed the photograph.” He explained: the angle showed exactly where the photographer had stood, at what time, through which door — narrowing thirty-one household staff down to four who’d passed that corridor that Saturday morning. “Now I know who it was.”
“You let them print that you can’t have children. Just to learn one name.”
“Yes. Don’t clean the second floor corridor mornings anymore. Let someone else.”
On Friday, the hospital shuttle never came — Eastern Avenue blocked by an accident that wasn’t an accident, three vehicles sealing the road like game pieces. Poppy was paler than usual, two and a half days past her last treatment. Ruth called Walter’s number in desperation. Fifteen minutes later, August arrived himself, driving alone, taking roads through the container yards that ordinary Baltimore never saw. At the hospital, he carried Poppy up the steps himself, his cane falling and rolling away, unretrieved, his full weight coming down on a leg that hadn’t borne it in ten years.