SHE WAS HIRED TO COMFORT A DYING MAFIA BOSS—THEN A STRAY CAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Chapter 1: The Gate

Celeste Harlow stepped down from the black SUV as night settled fully over the Chicago suburbs. The wrought-iron gates of the Cade estate groaned shut behind her — a heavy, final sound, like a warning she was too far in to heed. She didn’t turn around. There was nothing left behind her to turn back to.

Twenty-seven years old. Widowed three years. No close family, no future beyond a stack of unpaid bills and an eviction notice from the last miserable apartment she’d called home. A week earlier, a lawyer in a black suit had walked into the St. Catherine Free Clinic at two in the morning and laid a contract in front of her: care for a VIP patient for three months, and every debt she owed would disappear, along with enough money to start over. No name. No explanation. Only a line that told her Dorothy Cade had been watching her for a long time and believed she was the only suitable choice.

Everyone in Chicago knew the Cade name — the most powerful, most feared family in the city. Celeste looked down at her own hands, the hands that had once saved lives before the entire medical establishment turned its back on her for telling a male doctor to his face that he was wrong, and she signed anyway.

Elias Cade, head of the family, was dying. A wasting illness had been consuming him for nine months, turning a man who once made all of Chicago tremble into a shadow curled in sweat-soaked sheets. More than a dozen world-class specialists had examined him and found nothing they could fix. Dorothy hadn’t hired Celeste to cure him — that was impossible. She’d hired her to bring her grandson some measure of comfort in his final days.

Celeste accepted for one reason only: she needed the money. What she didn’t know was that the doctors hadn’t been wrong because the case was hopeless. They’d been wrong because they’d been deceived.