Chapter 3
For one week, none of them knew.
That was the cruelty of it — the quiet, patient cruelty that never announced itself with sirens or gunfire. It moved through the Rossi house in broad daylight, complimenting the staff on their work, asking after the baby in a voice dripping with warmth while its eyes stayed cold as glass.
Mara learned the rhythm of Nico’s feedings. Damiano began, cautiously, to breathe again. And the person responsible for two weeks of a dying infant glided past them all, smiling.
She arrived on the fourth morning, sweeping through the front doors in black that looked more like couture than mourning. Vittoria D’Angelo. Isabella’s younger sister. The grieving aunt, come to check on her ailing nephew, or so the story went. Diamonds at her throat. Chanel and heels on the marble. When she leaned over the crib to coo at the baby, Mara caught something flicker across her face for less than half a second.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t relief. It was fury — pure and unmistakable — gone so fast that if Mara had blinked, she would have missed it entirely.
“My sweet nephew,” Vittoria murmured instead, straightening with a smile stitched perfectly back into place. Then her eyes slid to Mara, sweeping down and up with a contempt she didn’t bother to hide. “And you. The hero maid. How rustic.”
Mara said nothing. She kept her eyes down, the way she’d learned to during years of surviving a man who mistook silence for submission. But her mind was already working, cataloguing the moment the way she once catalogued every shift in Cole’s voice before it turned violent. She recognized performance when she saw it. Vittoria D’Angelo was performing.
Two nights later, the performance nearly cost Mara her life.
She had gone to the small kitchen adjoining the nursery suite to brew her nightly cup of fennel and nettle tea — the strange, quiet ritual that had become the only still moment in her exhausting days. The estate was asleep. The new night nurse had stepped out for a few minutes. And there, in the medical fridge Damiano had stocked with backup formula in case Mara’s own supply ever failed, she noticed something small and wrong.
A tamper-evident seal, lifted just slightly on one of the brand-new bottles.
She told herself it was nothing. Then she picked it up anyway, some old instinct refusing to let it go, and unscrewed the cap.
Beneath the sweet, milky smell, there was something else. Faint. Metallic. Almost like bitter almonds.
Dr. Whitfield’s words rose up unbidden in her memory. We’ve run every toxicology screen. There is no medical explanation.
What if they’d been looking for the wrong kind of poison?
A shadow crossed the doorway before she could finish the thought. When she turned, she was staring down the barrel of a silenced pistol held in steady, practiced hands by a woman she recognized instantly — Greta, the head nurse Damiano had thrown off the estate days earlier for falling asleep on duty.
May you like
Except she hadn’t left. Not really.
“Your little nursing trick,” Greta said softly, stepping into the kitchen and kicking the door shut behind her. “You cost me everything.” She tilted her head, and in the low light her smile looked like something chipped out of ice. “You should have just kept scrubbing the floors, little girl.”
