She Came to Nurse a Dying Mafia Boss—Then Discovered Someone Was Poisoning Him and Fell for the Man Everyone Wanted Dead
### Chapter 6
The plan they built that morning was precise, patient, and dangerous. Elias would keep pretending — groaning at the right moments, trembling on cue, letting his voice fray exactly as it had for nine months, performing his own decline with a skill that startled even Celeste. Behind closed doors, purged by antidote three times a day, he grew stronger: sat up unassisted by the third day, stood by the fifth, walked the length of the room by the seventh.
His hair grew back so fast it became its own problem. Every night, once the mansion slept, Celeste sat beside him with a razor and candlelight, carefully shaving away what twelve specialists had insisted was medically impossible — their faces close in a silence that belonged to no one else in that house.
Finn came by every evening without fail, sitting beside his brother’s bed with books he read aloud, with stories of their childhood, with the kind of devotion that couldn’t be faked. He didn’t know about the poison. He didn’t know about the plan. He sat in the dark and held his brother’s hand and cried when he thought no one was looking, and Celeste watched Elias’s face twist with a pain that had nothing to do with poison — the agony of not knowing whether his own brother would survive the truth when it finally came.
“You have to tell him,” she said one night, after Finn had left. “He loves you. Whatever else is happening in this house, that’s real.”
“I know,” Elias said, his voice barely a whisper. “That’s what makes it so hard. If he’s innocent, telling him will destroy him. If he’s guilty… I’ll have to kill the only brother I’ve ever had.”
The next day, Bianca visited with a basket of fresh flowers and a radiant smile. She was Finn’s wife — twenty-four years old, golden-haired, with the kind of beauty that seemed designed to make everyone in the room feel less. She kissed Elias on the forehead, sat beside his bed, and chatted about nothing with perfect, practiced warmth.
But Celeste watched her closely now. She watched the way Bianca’s eyes flicked to Oscar the moment she crossed the threshold. Watched the almost invisible nod that passed between them. Watched the way Bianca’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes when she looked at her dying brother-in-law.
That evening at dinner, Bianca rose from her chair, one hand resting over her stomach, and announced with a glowing smile that she was two months pregnant. Finn wrapped his arms around her, eyes shining with tears. Dorothy forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Celeste sat at the far end of the table watching, saying nothing, filing it all away.
The next morning, Dorothy summoned her with an envelope of long-lens photographs — the mansion, the courtyard, license plates sharp enough to read — along with a note in handwriting Dorothy identified as Cain Vulov’s, a rival boss who had been circling Cade territory for months. *We know which room he sleeps in.*
“Vulov doesn’t have the reach to get photographs this detailed from outside the walls,” Dorothy said, her eyes hard. “Someone inside this house is feeding him information.”
Celeste looked at the photographs, then at Dorothy, and felt the final pieces slide into place with a soft, sickening click. Bianca’s whispered phone calls that ended the instant she was seen. The way she always knew exactly when to visit. The silver bullet that had arrived with impeccable timing.
She didn’t say it out loud yet. She had connection, not proof. And in this world, accusing the wrong person could be worse than accusing no one at all.