My Husband Called Me a Trophy Wife, So I Saved the Mafia Don Instead novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Yellow Halo

Audrey proves the poison from Luca's own pulse and eyes, sets her four terms, and the vial's torn label points to Mercy General, where his father died on her table.

Luca did not call my husband.

He put the phone face down on the blotter and looked at me.

"Teo," he said. "Close the door."

The big man I had met at the gate shut it and stood in front of it with his arms folded.

"Mrs. Penhurst," Luca said. "You walk in here at one in the morning with your husband's gun and tell me I'm being murdered."

"Yes."

"If you're lying, you won't leave this house."

"I know."

"If you're right," he said, and stopped.

"Then you want proof," I said. "Give me your wrist."

For a moment nobody breathed.

Luca held out his left arm across the desk.

I put two fingers on the inside of his wrist and watched the clock on the wall.

His skin was warm and dry, and the pulse under it was slow.

Then it did what I had expected.

Two beats close together, a pause, two beats close together, a pause.

I counted a full minute to be sure.

"Forty-eight a minute," I said. "In pairs. Have your doctors told you that?"

"They said the rhythm was irregular."

"It's irregular in a pattern, and a pattern means a cause."

I let go of his wrist.

"Lean toward the lamp."

He leaned.

I pulled down the skin under his left eye with my thumb, and he allowed it.

"Look at the light, not at me."

"Tell me what you see."

"A yellow ring," he said slowly. "Around the bulb. It's been there since spring."

"Nobody else knows that."

"No."

"Your stomach turns after you eat, and you lose the appetite for the next day."

"Teo knows," Luca said quietly.

"Mr. Ricci has watched you push your plate away for months," I said, "and he can't tell you why."

Teo said nothing, but his folded arms came down.

"A heart that fails slowly doesn't ring the lights yellow," I said. "A heart that has been fed a plant poison does."

I picked up the vial.

"This is a concentrated extract from foxglove. A little of it steadies a sick heart. Too much stops one. It's hard to catch, because a bad heart and a poisoned heart look almost the same on every machine in the city."

"Almost," Luca said.

"Almost. Unless someone looks at the right thing."

He sat back, and his eyes did not leave my face.

"You're a nurse."

"No."

"A pharmacist."

"No."

I thought about telling him.

I thought about the six years I had spent not saying my own name aloud, and the reason for it.

"I was trained to treat hearts, Mr. Fontana. I'm not allowed to anymore."

"By who?"

"By people who weren't in the room."

He looked at me for another long moment.

Then he took a pen from the desk and wrote a note on a card.

"Teo. Take this and the vial to the chemist downstairs. Tell him I want it now."

Teo went out, and the door clicked behind him.

We sat in the lamplight.

I did not look at the cold soup, and he did not look at me.

"Why come to me?" he said finally. "You could have gone to the police. You could have gone to a newspaper."

"The police take weeks, and you don't have weeks."

"And?"

"And the vial was in my husband's drawer, and my husband works for you."

"He works for the family," Luca said.

"Then you should ask who else in your family can reach him."

His jaw tightened.

"You know what that sounds like."

"It sounds like the truth," I said. "I can't make it sound better."

He nearly smiled.

It changed his whole face for half a second, and then it was gone.

"Terms," he said. "You want something."

I had thought about this on the bridge.

"Four things."

"Go on."

"One. Nobody learns that I treat hearts. To your people I'm a specialist you hired. Nothing more."

"Two. I eat and drink only what Teo cooks and what I watch him make, and so do you."

"Three. You don't touch me unless you're giving me your pulse."

His eyebrow lifted.

"That's not a rule a man needs to be told."

"Four. When we know who did this, I'm free to leave and nobody follows me."

"You'll want money."

"I'll want my husband in a room with the people he works for," I said. "That's all I want."

Luca held out his hand across the desk.

I took it, and his grip was careful and warm.

The door opened, and Teo stood there with the card in his hand and a different look on his face.

"Boss. The chemist says it's real. Digitoxin, strong, and it's been put in a lot more than once."

"And the vial?"

"The label's half torn off," Teo said. "But what's left is the crest. Mercy General Hospital. The compounding pharmacy."

Luca went very still.

"That's where my father died."

I kept my face still, because I had trained it to.

Aldo Fontana had died on my operating table six years ago, under my hands, in Mercy General's fourth-floor theater.

His son did not know it, and neither did anyone else in this house.

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