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

Chapter 13: The Lavender Garden

That night, Celeste found Elias alone on the stone bench by the lavender bed at three in the morning, walking there on his own two feet for the first time. She sat beside him in silence, because some wounds only need someone willing to stay.

“I almost died,” he finally said, “because a twenty-four-year-old girl wanted to wear a crown.” He grieved for Finn, whose capacity to trust anyone had been murdered along with nine months of his brother’s life — and for the child growing in Bianca’s womb, his own blood, born from betrayal.

Celeste, for the first time in three years, opened the door she’d kept shut since her husband died in a warehouse fire while she was four months pregnant — the miscarriage that followed within the same week, the small yellow baby shirt with a duck stitched on the chest that she’d bought and never got to use. She told him without her voice breaking, because carrying grief for three years had taught her how not to be crushed by it, even as it never grew lighter.

He said nothing about being sorry. He simply pulled her against him, and they sat together in the lavender under the stars, two people who understood exactly how heavy the other’s pain really was.