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

### Chapter 4

She sat on the edge of the bed and let him hold her hand, and slowly, as the herbal tea did what little it could to ease the pain, his breathing evened, his jaw unclenched, and his eyes opened — wet in the moonlight in a way she had never seen them.

“I’m afraid to die, Celeste.” Not Miss Harllo. The first time he had ever said her name. “This is the first time I’ve admitted that to anyone.”

She heard her own name in his broken voice like it was being spoken for the first time anywhere in the world. She pressed her palm to his cheek, wiped the sweat from his temple, and he leaned into her hand the way a man leans into the only wall still standing after an earthquake. Then he drew her toward him — slowly, giving her every chance to pull away.

She didn’t pull away.

The kiss that followed wasn’t hunger. It tasted of salt, and neither of them could have said afterward whose tears it was. It was the kiss of two people standing at the edge of the same cliff — one terrified of falling, the other terrified she wouldn’t be strong enough to hold on in time.

“If I’m about to die,” he whispered against her mouth, “then at least let me know what this feels like once.”

She stayed with him all night. Sat with her back against the headboard, his head resting near her shoulder, his hand refusing to let go of hers even in sleep. And it was in the deep, finally peaceful hours before dawn, stroking her fingers absently along the back of his neck, that she felt it.

Hundreds of new hairs. Short, stiff, pushing up through skin that twelve of the world’s leading doctors had sworn would never grow hair again.

His heart stopped for a beat. Hers did too. She pulled the notebook from her coat with trembling hands and turned, by moonlight, to the chart she had been building for two weeks. And there it was, laid out in ink with a clarity that could no longer be argued with, explained away, or ignored.

Every day she had cooked for him, his symptoms had gone down. Every day Oscar had cooked for him, they had gone up. Not one single exception.

She didn’t confront anyone that morning. She simply cooked breakfast as she always had, said nothing about her absence, and watched Elias eat in silence — accepting it as the only apology he knew how to offer. Then she took the leftover plate Oscar had brought the evening before — the half-eaten bacon and eggs Elias had abandoned when the pain struck him down — wrapped it in a cloth, and carried it into the garden.

The gray stray cat that wandered near the kitchen door every morning ate it greedily and vanished into the hedges.

That afternoon, Celeste found it curled beneath the oak tree near the southern fence — its small body convulsing, vomit and undigested food in the grass beside it, its eyes dull, its legs jerking in slow, involuntary spasms. Elias’s exact symptoms, reduced into a body the size of a housecat.

She knelt beside the dying animal with steady hands and a mind gone cold and very, very clear, and she understood she was looking at proof no laboratory could argue with. That night, locked in her bathroom, she called Sister Monica at St. Catherine’s and described everything — the chart, the pattern, the cat, the strange herbal note she couldn’t place in the water someone had left on her nightstand.

A long silence on the line. Long enough that Celeste could hear her own bathroom clock ticking off each second.

“Bring me a sample of the food,” Sister Monica said finally, her voice grave. “But if this is what I think it is, Celeste — you are living under the same roof as a murderer.”