She Came to Nurse a Dying Mafia Boss—Then Discovered Someone Was Poisoning Him and Fell for the Man Everyone Wanted Dead
### Chapter 5
At one in the morning, when every light in the mansion had gone out, Celeste slipped through the back door with a sealed sample container hidden inside her coat and drove the staff car through the sleeping streets of Chicago.
Sister Monica was waiting at the clinic in her white coat, though it was long past midnight. She was a small woman in her sixties with silver-streaked hair pulled into a tight bun and hands that had spent forty years learning the difference between medicine and poison. She took the sample without a word, carried it to her workbench, and began the meticulous work of separating each ingredient of the seasoning with the practiced patience of someone who had dedicated her life to knowing exactly what plants could do to the human body.
Nearly an hour passed before she lifted her head. The expression on her face was one Celeste had never seen on her before — anger and horror, tangled together.
“Black herb,” she said, pointing to fragments nearly invisible among the pepper and basil. “A chronic poison. A small dose every day, building up in the body for months. Vomiting. Tremors. Hair loss. Fainting. Abdominal pain. Total wasting. If it isn’t stopped, the victim dies within weeks to months — and no doctor will ever find the cause, because the symptoms mimic a dozen other diseases.”
She placed a small bundle of dried herbs into Celeste’s palm. “The antidote. Mix it into food or water three times a day. It will take weeks to fully purge what’s already built up in his body.” Her hand closed around Celeste’s wrist, and her eyes were fierce in the dim clinic light. “Who is doing this?”
Celeste looked down at the small, impossibly light bundle that was meant to undo nine months of slow murder. “I don’t know who’s behind it yet. But I know who’s putting it in.”
She drove back before dawn, the antidote pressed against her chest like a second heartbeat. She locked Elias’s door behind her and laid the whole truth in front of him: the chart, the cat, the poison, the antidote. Each piece placed in order like a nurse delivering a case report she had spent two weeks preparing to give.
He listened without interrupting once. She watched understanding move across his face like a storm building over open water — stillness, then ripples, then something close to violence. When she finished, he lifted a hand to the back of his own neck and felt, for the first time with his own fingers, the new hair growing where doctors had sworn nothing would ever grow again. He looked at his hands and held them out in front of him. They weren’t shaking.
“I don’t have a terminal illness,” he said, each word landing like stone. “I’ve been poisoned.”
Celeste watched him transform in front of her — the gaunt, exhausted man vanishing into someone with a spine of tempered steel and eyes colder than the silver bullet that had arrived on his nightstand. Not rage. Something far more dangerous than rage: the deathly stillness of a man who had already decided exactly who would pay, and how, and simply hadn’t told anyone yet.
“Call my grandmother,” he said. “Right now.”
Dorothy arrived within ten minutes in slippers and a robe thrown on in haste. She was a woman in her seventies with iron-gray hair and a face that had seen more death than most soldiers, and when Celeste told her the whole story, Celeste watched her cry — silently, without a sound, tears cutting through the deep lines of her face like water through stone. Then she wiped her cheeks with the back of one hand and lifted her head as someone entirely reforged.
“We will deal with this,” she said. “The Cade way.”