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

Chapter 6: The Notebook and the Bullet

The days that followed brought small, steady changes. Elias snapped less. Ate more. Sometimes picked up the spoon without the ritual of refusal first. Celeste cooked every meal herself before dawn, refusing Oscar’s persistent, oddly insistent offers to help, and each refusal made his smile tighten at the corners in a way she couldn’t yet explain.

Her notebook grew thicker every night — symptoms, timing, severity, dosage, all charted with the precision of someone who believed the truth always hid inside numbers.

One morning, the atmosphere in Elias’s room had changed entirely. Two bodyguards stood like statues against the wall. On the nightstand sat an open box on black velvet — a silver bullet engraved with his own name, and a card: We hear you’re unwell. Happy to help the Cade family with a smooth transition.

Elias didn’t raise his voice. He never did when it mattered. “Send this bullet back to Cain, along with the little finger of the man who delivered it, and tell him next time he wants to send a message, he should bring it himself.”

Celeste stood frozen in the corner, watching a man she’d been lifting into bed and feeding porridge to order a mutilation in the same flat tone most people used to order coffee. When she asked, quietly, if he was afraid, he only asked her the same question back. “No,” she said. “But I understand why other people are.” Something almost like a smile crossed his face before he closed his eyes.

Later that night, she found him wheelchair-bound and staring longingly out his window — “What’s it like outside tonight? I don’t remember what wind feels like anymore.” — and, against every rule of caution she’d built her life on, she pushed him out into the garden under cover of darkness.

In the lavender bed his mother had loved before she died when he was seven, Elias told her the only thing he feared wasn’t death — it was dying and being remembered only as the boss, the name people feared, never as the boy who once planted flowers for his mother.

“I’ll remember,” Celeste told him. “I’ll remember you as the man who planted lavender for his mother.”

He held her hand that night longer than either of them meant to let go.