THE LABELS WE FORGED IN BLOOD AND SILENCE

The private study of Matteo Romano was lined with dark walnut bookshelves that stretched twelve feet to the ceiling.

The room smelled of tobacco, old parchment, and expensive gun oil.

Behind his heavy oak desk hung an oil painting of Salvatore Romano, captured in his prime with a cigar between his fingers and the same cold, unyielding eyes that now stared at me from across the desk.

Donna Carmela sat in her wheelchair near the unlit fireplace, wrapped in a heavy cashmere blanket that Silas had brought up from the linen closet.

She had refused to go to sleep.

The old woman looked smaller now, drained by the revelation that had cracked open the foundation of her home, but her eyes were remarkably sharp.

On the green blotter between Matteo and me sat the two amber medicine bottles.

Beside them was a small, high-powered forensic flashlight and a magnifying glass.

“Sit down, Claire,” Matteo said.

I hesitated, glancing at the plush leather wingback chair.

Maids in the Romano household did not sit in the boss’s private armchairs.

“Sit,” he repeated, his voice firm but not unkind.

I pulled out the heavy leather chair and sat down, keeping my spine perfectly straight and my hands folded in my lap.

The scratch on my neck throbbed with a dull, burning heat.

Matteo reached into a lower desk drawer and pulled out a glass bottle of antiseptic along with a roll of sterile gauze.

He didn't call for a maid.

He didn't call for a bodyguard.

He soaked a cotton pad with the stinging liquid, leaned across the desk, and gently pressed it against the scratches on my collarbone.

I flinched at the sharp bite of the alcohol.

“Hold it there,” he instructed softly.

I took the cotton pad from his fingers, our skin brushing for a fraction of a second.

His hands were rough, calloused from years of physical violence, yet his touch had been surprisingly gentle.

“Now,” Matteo said, leaning back into his high-backed leather chair, steepling his fingers beneath his chin.

“Talk to me.”

“I was a student at the Rush University College of Nursing,” I began, my voice clear in the quiet room.

“I completed three years of practical pharmacology, clinical rotations, and emergency triage.”

“My father, Thomas Miller, was a foreman for high-rise steel construction.”

“Two years ago, a temporary safety cable snapped on a job site in the Loop.”

“He fell twenty feet onto concrete reinforcement bars.”

I looked down at the mahogany surface.

“The general contractor denied liability because my father’s union dues had lapsed by two weeks.”

“The medical bills were over two hundred thousand dollars.”

“My mother had passed away from breast cancer when I was twelve.”

“It was just me and my brother, Leo.”

Matteo’s eyes never left my face.

“So you abandoned your degree.”

“I didn't have a choice,” I said simply.

“Leo was nineteen, brilliant with computers, and had just received an acceptance letter from the engineering program at Illinois Tech.”

“If I stayed in school, we would have lost the house and Leo would have had to work twelve-hour shifts at a distribution center.”

“One of us had to get an education that could pull the family out of the South Side.”

“So I dropped out, took my CNA license, and looked for high-paying private domestic work.”

“A placement agency recommended the Romano estate ten months ago.”

“They said you paid three times the market rate for housekeepers who could pass a comprehensive background check and keep their mouths shut.”

“And you never told the agency about your nursing background?” Matteo asked.

“If you put medical credentials on a maid’s resume, people think you’re either overqualified, desperate, or a thief looking for prescription narcotics,” I answered honestly.

“I just wanted to do my job, collect my paycheck, pay my brother’s tuition, and go home.”

Donna Carmela spoke from the fireplace, her voice soft and maternal.

“You never just cleaned, Claire.”

I turned toward the old woman.

“Every morning when you brought my tea, you adjusted my footrests so my circulation wouldn't cut off,” Donna Carmela said, a gentle, sorrowful smile touching her lips.

“When my hands were too stiff to button my cuffs, you warmed the cloth with an iron first.”

“I knew you had healing hands, child.”

“I just didn't realize how much danger we were in until you refused to let that bottle touch my lips.”

Matteo looked at his mother, his expression softening for a fleeting moment before hardening back into stone as he looked back at the medicine.

“Tell me about the pills, Claire.”

“Clinically.”

“What would have happened if my mother had taken the dose Alessandra handed her tonight?”

I took a deep breath, setting the used cotton pad down on the corner of the blotter.

“Donna Carmela takes Lanoxin—brand-name digitalis—for congestive heart failure and atrial flutter.”

“The therapeutic window for digitalis is exceptionally narrow.”

“That means the difference between a therapeutic dose and a lethal toxicity level is measured in fractions of a milligram.”

I pointed toward the white-labeled bottle.

“The pills inside that bottle are not regular digitalis.”

“They are compounded digitoxin mixed with high-dose propranolol, manufactured under Evelyn Vale’s name.”

“If Donna Carmela had taken two whole tablets at nine o'clock, her heart rate would have plummeted below thirty beats per minute within three hours.”

“The combination would have induced severe ventricular tachycardia, followed by complete heart block.”

“By two o'clock in the morning, her heart would have simply stopped contracting.”

Matteo leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of the desk.

“And the autopsy?”

“That is the terrifying part,” I said, looking him dead in the eye.

“Because Donna Carmela already has an active prescription for cardiac glycosides, a standard medical examiner’s screen would show the presence of the drug in her blood.”

“Unless the medical examiner ran a specialized quantitative mass spectrometry test to check the exact ratio of digitoxin versus digoxin, it would be ruled as an accidental overdose caused by the patient’s own confusion.”

“Or simply a natural cardiac arrest brought on by her preexisting heart condition.”

Matteo’s breathing turned ragged.

He closed his eyes for five long seconds.

When he opened them, the darkness inside them was suffocating.

“That is exactly how my father died,” Matteo whispered.

He looked up at the oil painting on the wall.

“Two years ago, Salvatore woke up in the middle of the night clutching his chest.”

“By the time the ambulance arrived from Northwestern, he was blue.”

“The coroner signed off on natural heart failure without a full toxicology workup because my father had been sick for months.”

He stood up, walking toward the high arched window overlooking the rainy Chicago skyline.

“Alessandra entered my life four months before my father died.”

“Her family proposed a merger between our transport networks and their concrete supply lines.”

“She played the devoted, dutiful daughter-in-law.”

“She sat by his bed.”

“She organized his medicines.”

“She brought him his evening tea.”

He turned around, his silhouette framed by the wet glass and the city lights behind him.

“She didn't just want to marry me.”

“She wanted to hollow out the Romano family from the inside out.”

“First my father.”

“Then my mother.”

“And once we were married, Claire...”

He didn't need to finish the sentence.

Once Alessandra Vale was married to Matteo Romano and held legal power of attorney, a stray bullet or an accidental overdose would make the Vale family the sole proprietors of the largest empire in the Midwest.

Suddenly, the study door clicked open.

Silas stepped into the room, his face grim, his leather jacket dripping with rainwater.

“Boss,” Silas said, keeping his voice low.

“We have a problem.”

Matteo didn't move.

“What is it?”

“We tracked the address on that Cicero compounding prescription.”

Silas pulled a wet piece of paper from his pocket.

“The pharmacy was closed two hours ago, but the backdoor was pried open with a crowbar.”

“The pharmacist was found in the basement storage room.”

Matteo’s eyes narrowed.

“Is he alive?”