"The youngest mafia boss in Chicago was slowly dying in a room full of doctors. Then a new maid arrived with her daughter—and he discovered who was really poisoning him."

2:17 a.m.

The instant the clock changed, the temperature in the room dropped thirty degrees. The portable heater sputtered, its orange coils dying out with a faint, pathetic click as the frost began to form across the inside of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan.

My breath plumed into white vapor. My teeth slammed together with a sickening crunch that echoed in my skull. Every drop of blood in my veins turned to liquid nitrogen, paralyzing my muscles, locking my jaw, and dragging me down into a dark, freezing abyss.

I let out a ragged, choked gasp, trying to pull my hand away from Lily so she wouldn't feel the terrifying transformation taking place in my body.

“Don't,” the little girl whispered.

Her fingers didn't slip away. Instead, she squeezed my frozen hand tighter, her small palm radiating a fierce, impossible warmth that defied the sub-zero chill consuming the room.

Dr. Harris lunged forward, grabbing a stack of heated towels from the warming trolley. “His heart rate is dropping! Fifty beats per minute—forty! Get those blankets back on him!”

Chaos erupted around the bed. Nurses rushed in from the adjoining monitoring room, shouting medical jargon, pressing oxygen masks toward my face, and tearing open emergency epinephrine ampoules.

Through the blur of white coats and flashing monitor lights, I saw Vanessa standing by the fireplace. She wasn't panicking. She wasn't crying. She was watching me with an expression of cold, clinical curiosity, her fingers tapping rhythmically against the gold band of her watch.

She’s waiting for me to flatline, the thought flashed through my freezing mind with crystalline clarity.

“Mr. Vance!” Elena screamed, dropping to her knees beside the bed, wrapping her arms around Lily as if trying to shield her from the monster dying in front of her. “Take her away! Please, Mr. Vance, let her go!”

“No,” I forced out, the word grinding past my frostbitten lips like gravel.

I looked down at Lily. Her dark eyes weren't filled with fear. They were burning with the exact same stubborn, unyielding defiance I had seen in my own reflection every morning of my life.

And then, something impossible happened.

The ice inside my veins didn't melt—it fought back.

As Lily’s small hand pressed against my skin, the freezing numbness that usually paralyzed my chest wall suddenly retreated, pulling back toward my left shoulder like a wounded animal crawling into a cave. My lungs expanded with a sharp, burning intake of air that felt like swallowing fire.

Dr. Harris dropped his stethoscope, his jaw practically hitting the floor as the heart monitor beside the bed abruptly spiked from forty-five beats per minute back up to a steady, strong eighty-five.

“That’s... that’s medically impossible,” the doctor stammered, staring at the digital readout as if it had just grown teeth. “His core temperature was sixty-eight degrees a second ago! How is he stabilizing? What just happened?!”

Vanessa turned sharply away from the fireplace, her composure finally cracking. Her blue eyes widened in sudden, genuine terror as she stared at the little girl holding my hand.

“Get that child out of this room right now,” Vanessa hissed, her voice losing its polished, aristocratic veneer, revealing the desperate, feral panic underneath. “Elena, grab your daughter and get out before I have security throw you both out onto the street!”

“No one is throwing anyone anywhere,” I said.

My voice was rough, bruised, but entirely steady. I pulled my hand out of Lily’s grasp—not because I wanted to, but because the freezing numbness had finally receded back into the deep shadows of my body, leaving me exhausted, drenched in sweat, but very much alive.

I sat up against the propped pillows, my eyes locking onto my fiancée.

“The doctor said my condition looks like continued exposure, Vanessa,” I said softly, the silence of the room pressing down on us like a physical weight. “Every night at 2:17 a.m., my body shuts down. But tonight... for the first time in six months, the poison didn't take.”

Vanessa’s throat bobbed as she swallowed hard. She forced a brittle, nervous smile back onto her face, stepping toward the bed with her hands extended in a gesture of outraged innocence.

“Julian, darling... you’re delirious. You’re listening to this paranoid physician and a cleaning woman with delusions of grandeur. You survived a heart attack brought on by lifestyle stress. Of course you’re paranoid—you’re a mafia boss, everyone wants your seat.”

“True,” I replied, my gaze never leaving hers. “Which is why I’m going to find out exactly who is pouring slow-acting synthetic neurotoxins into my evening scotch every single night at midnight.”