She Came to Nurse a Dying Mafia Boss—Then Discovered Someone Was Poisoning Him and Fell for the Man Everyone Wanted Dead

### Chapter 3

She didn’t drink it.

Celeste stood in the middle of her small room with the glass held an inch from her lips, and some instinct older than training — older than the three years of hospital shifts that had taught her to trust her hands more than her fear — stopped her before the water ever touched her mouth. She carried it to the bathroom instead, tipped it down the drain, and watched it disappear in a thin, innocent spiral. She told herself she was being paranoid. She didn’t believe herself even as she thought it.

From that night forward, she drank only water she drew from the tap with her own hands, and she never let the notebook leave her coat pocket again — not when she slept, not when she bathed, not when she sat in the velvet chair beside Elias’s bed and pretended, for his sake, that nothing in the house had changed.

But something had changed, and it wasn’t only in her room.

The next morning, Celeste overslept for the first time since arriving at the Cade estate — a bone-deep exhaustion finally catching up to a body that had run on fear and adrenaline for two straight weeks. When she woke, sunlight was already flooding through the curtains and the clock read a quarter to ten. She ran the length of the hallway in her socks.

She found Elias sitting up against the headboard, a tray in front of him loaded with the same greasy bacon and dry, stiff eggs he had been served for nine straight months before she arrived — and Oscar standing beside the bed with an expression of quiet, terrible satisfaction.

“Mr. Cade, I’m sorry, I—”

“I can’t wait forever on your goodwill, Miss Harllo.” He didn’t look at her. His eyes stayed fixed on the tray, his voice flatter and colder than she had heard it since her very first night in that room. “I don’t need to wait for you.”

She understood that he wasn’t angry because she had been late. He was angry because he had opened a door for her, and for the first time, she hadn’t walked through it.

The four days that followed were the longest of Celeste’s life since the week her husband died. Oscar took over every meal with tireless, punishing regularity — bacon and eggs, three times a day, delivered with the calm devotion of a man who had waited a long time for permission to go back to doing things his way. Elias barely spoke to her at all. His hands began trembling again by the second day. His color drained by the third. By the fourth night, his eyes had gone dull — the particular hollowness of a body losing a fight it had briefly, mistakenly, believed it was winning.

Celeste lay awake in her room that fourth night staring at the ceiling, feeling something cold settle low in her stomach that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with dread. She put on her coat. She slipped the notebook into her pocket out of habit. And a little before midnight, she walked down the darkened hallway to a door she no longer had permission to open.

She opened it anyway.

Darkness hit her first. Then the sound — low, broken, coming from the far side of the bed, near the window. Celeste rushed around the mattress and found Elias curled on the hardwood floor, both arms wrapped around his stomach, knees drawn up to his chest, his whole body shaking in a cold sweat that had soaked through his sleep shirt and pooled beneath his face.

“It hurts.” His voice was the voice of a man being torn apart from the inside, and he didn’t try to hide it anymore. “My stomach has never hurt like this. This time I’m really dying.”

She dropped to her knees beside him. She was up, brewing the herbal tea she always kept ready, back at his side before the kettle had even finished its second boil, lifting his head into her lap and tipping the cup to his lips in small, careful sips until the pain in his face began, slowly, to loosen its grip.

She got him back into bed. Pulled the blanket to his chest. Pressed her palm to his forehead to check the fever. And when she started to rise, to retreat to the chair by the window the way she had every night before, his hand shot out and caught her wrist. Not gently this time. Hard. Desperate. The grip of a drowning man who has found, at the last possible second, something floating on the surface of the water.

“Stay here,” he said. “Sit here beside me. I’m afraid that if I close my eyes now, I won’t wake up again.”

She stayed.