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

### Chapter 7

On the twelfth night of the plan, it all came apart.

Celeste was shaving new beard growth from Elias’s chin by candlelight — their secret ritual — when three urgent knocks hit the door. One of Dorothy’s trusted guards, disguised for weeks as a groundskeeper, stood there with sweat on his brow. “Sir, Oscar just left his room. Third floor, east wing, the abandoned rooms. Someone was already waiting for him.”

Elias rose. Celeste watched the transformation happen in under a second: patient to boss, blue eyes gone to tempered steel. He held out his hand without asking whether she wanted to come, and she took it without hesitation.

They moved through the dark, dust-thick hallways of the abandoned third floor until voices reached them through a thin wooden door. Two voices. One was Oscar’s. The other was Bianca’s — but a Bianca neither of them had ever heard before. No sweetness left in it at all. Just cold calculation wrapped in silk.

“How much did he eat today?”

“Almost the entire plate, ma’am,” Oscar answered.

“Good. Increase the dose. I want this finished in two more weeks. That little nurse has started slowing things down.”

“But he’s eating your food again. We can’t miss this chance.”

The rustle of paper. Then Bianca’s voice again, reciting a plan she clearly knew by heart: “The baby in my belly will be the only true heir of the Cade family. Finn will become boss when Elias is gone. And I’ll be the one who truly holds power behind him. Vulov agreed. Once Finn rises, I give up the Southside for protection during the transition. Cain is very pleased.”

Elias’s hand tightened around Celeste’s hard enough to hurt. She tightened back — not against the pain, but because she understood he needed to know, in that instant, that he wasn’t facing this truth alone.

Then he kicked the door in.

Wood cracked against the wall. The candle flared. Oscar went white as paper, his back flattening against the wall, shaking — really shaking, not the performance he had forced Elias into for nine months. But Bianca didn’t flinch. She stood in the middle of the room in her silk nightgown, phone still in hand, and there wasn’t a trace of fear on that flawless face. Only anger — pure, cold, and entirely without remorse.

“You,” she said, staring at Elias standing straight and strong in the doorway. The truth hit her like ice water. He wasn’t dying. He had known. Everything had failed. She turned to Oscar, and the look she gave him wasn’t a co-conspirator’s look. It was a mastermind’s contempt for a servant who had let her down. “Useless fool.”

Two words. Weightless and vicious.

Elias stepped into the room, Celeste behind him, guards sealing off every exit. There was only one question that mattered. “Does Finn know?”

Bianca laughed — short, cold, like broken glass on stone. “Finn. Finn loves you so stupidly it’s pathetic. He cries over you every night. He doesn’t know what seasoning I put in the food, much less what I’m doing. He’s my obedient puppet. Loving me blindly. Doing everything I tell him while thinking it’s his own idea.”

Relief and grief crossed Elias’s face at the same instant — relief that his brother wasn’t a traitor, grief that his brother had married a woman capable of this.