🐺 The Forbidden Bed That Made Her the Mafia Boss’s Fiancée

Chapter 05 - Nico’s Blood on the Marble

Nico Moretti was not dead.

That was the first fact Adrian’s people repeated, as if saying it enough times might make the blood on the marble less alarming.

He lay at the base of the foyer stairs, one hand pressed to his ribs, his expensive shirt blooming red beneath his fingers. A broken vase glittered beside him. White lilies—my lilies, ordered for the gala—floated in spilled water around his shoulder.

Vittoria stopped above him, cane in hand, her face carved from stone.

“Who did this?” Adrian asked.

Nico laughed once, then winced.

“You always assume I’m the problem.”

“You usually are.”

His eyes moved to me.

“She was never supposed to wake up there.”

My mouth went dry.

Adrian crouched beside him, calm in a way that made every guard in the room go quieter.

“Explain.”

Nico looked at me again. Sweat shone on his forehead.

“I moved her bag. Yes. I put the key inside. But I did not hurt her. I did not call Rafael.”

“You put her in my path.”

“Yes.”

Adrian’s jaw tightened.

“Why?”

Nico coughed. Blood touched his lip.

“Because your father told mine if Michael Brooks’s daughter ever appeared with the key, she was to be brought to you. Not the family. Not the Commission. You.”

“That is convenient.”

“It is the truth.”

“Then why hide it?”

Nico closed his eyes.

“Because I did not know who inside the house still worked for Rafael.”

A silence moved through the foyer.

Even Vittoria’s fingers tightened on her cane.

I knelt before thinking. Event planners are not doctors, but I had a lifetime of handling emergencies with napkins, pressure, and calm voices.

“Hold still,” I told Nico.

He opened one eye. “You are very bossy for a bride who isn’t one.”

“I’m not your bride and you’re bleeding on marble I had polished this morning.”

Adrian glanced at me. Again, that almost-softness flickered and vanished.

The doctor arrived within minutes. Nico was carried into a downstairs bedroom converted quickly into a medical suite. I expected Adrian to send me away. Instead, he kept me beside him as though my presence had become part of the strategy.

Or part of the lie.

I did not know which frightened me more.

While the doctor worked, Nico told us what he could.

He had discovered a message three weeks earlier, hidden in one of his father’s old wine ledgers. A note from Salvatore Moretti, dated two months before the fire. It mentioned Michael Brooks, a brass key, and a “daughter who will inherit what the men were too cowardly to keep.”

Nico thought it was nonsense until my name appeared on the vendor list for Adrian’s gala.

“Then I understood,” he said, pale against the pillow. “Not everything. Enough.”

“You drugged me?” I asked.

“No.”

I stared at him.

He looked genuinely offended. “I am many things, Elena. I do not drug women and leave them in bedrooms.”

“Then how did I sleep twelve hours?”

No one answered.

Adrian turned slowly toward his head of security.

“Pull the kitchen footage.”

The man left.

Ten minutes later, we watched security video in Adrian’s office. At 11:16 p.m., I stood in the service hallway holding a cup of tea one of the catering assistants had handed me.

I remembered the tea.

Lemon. Honey. Relief after a day without dinner.

The assistant’s face appeared clearly as she turned toward the camera.

Kate.

My assistant.

The woman I had hired six years earlier when neither of us could afford good coffee. The woman who knew my mother’s address, my schedule, my exhaustion, and every weak place in my life.

I sat down slowly.

“No.”

Adrian watched the screen, expression hard.

Kate waited until I drank half the tea. Then she guided me down the west corridor. I leaned against her, laughing tiredly at something. She opened Adrian’s forbidden bedroom door and helped me inside.

Then she left.

Two minutes later, Nico appeared in the hallway, looked both ways, and slipped the key into my handbag where it sat on a side table.

He had been telling the truth about that part.

But Kate—

I stood too quickly.

“I need to call her.”

Adrian blocked me with one hand.

“No.”

“She might be in danger.”

“She put you in mine.”

“You don’t know she had a choice.”

His eyes sharpened.