The ruthless mafia boss mocked the plus-size nurse everyone underestimated, then she became the only reason he survived the night

Part 3 — THE NIGHT HE SURVIVED

It came on a Thursday, three weeks in, in the dead hours after midnight.

Belle woke in the nurse’s room adjoining the master suite to the wrong kind of silence—the medical monitor in the next room had changed its rhythm. She was up and through the door before she was fully awake, the way six years of night intake had trained into her.

Augustine was burning up.

The infection they’d been holding at bay had broken through. His fever had spiked, his blood pressure was crashing, and the wound at his side—the one near the liver, the dangerous one—had gone hot and angry beneath its dressing. Septic. She knew it on sight. She had seen it kill people.

She also knew there was no time to move him.

“Darwin!” she shouted, already working. “I need the emergency kit, I need you to call whatever doctor you people use, and I need it all five minutes ago!”

What followed was the longest two hours of Belle Edwards’s life.

She did the things she knew how to do, and she did them fast and exactly right—because for all the cruelty about bakery delivery trucks, Belle Edwards was, underneath it, one of the best trauma nurses in the city, which was precisely why her agency had sent her into a house full of armed men. She managed his airway. She fought the fever. She kept his pressure up with the limited tools in the kit while the family’s doctor raced up from the city. She did not panic, because panic was a luxury and her patient could not afford it.

At one point, in the worst of it, Augustine’s fever-bright eyes opened and found her face.

“Everyone leaves,” he rasped, half-delirious. “You’ll leave too. They always—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Belle said fiercely, not pausing in her work. “You hear me, Augustine? I’m right here. I’m not leaving. Stay with me. You don’t get to die on my shift. I don’t lose patients to infection because they hurt my feelings, and I sure as hell don’t lose them at all. Stay.”

Whether it was the antibiotics, or the doctor who arrived at the eleventh hour, or the broad-shouldered nurse who refused to let go—Augustine Costello survived the night.

By dawn, the fever had broken.

By dawn, the danger had passed.

By dawn, Belle Edwards was sitting in the chair beside his bed, gray with exhaustion, still holding his wrist to monitor a pulse that had finally, finally steadied.

Augustine opened his eyes to morning light and a nurse who had not slept, who had not left, who had spent the worst night of his recovery with her hand on his pulse telling him he didn’t get to die.

“You stayed,” he said. His voice was wrecked.

“I told you I would,” Belle said.

“People say that. They don’t mean it.” He looked at her, and the cruelty was entirely gone from his face now, burned away in the fever, leaving something raw underneath. “I have been shot, Belle. I have been betrayed by men I trusted with my life. I have spent forty-six years certain that the only people who stay are the ones being paid to, and that the second the money stops, so do they.” His green eyes held hers. “You were paid to keep me alive. But you weren’t paid to hold my wrist all night so I wouldn’t be alone in the dark. That wasn’t in the contract. Nobody’s ever done that. Not once. Not in my whole life.”

Belle was too tired to put up her usual flat defenses.

“My mother used to hold my wrist when I was scared as a kid,” she said quietly. “Said as long as she could feel my pulse, she knew I was still there with her. I’ve done it for dying patients for fifteen years. It’s the one thing I can give people that the medicine can’t.” She looked at him. “Nobody should be alone in the dark, Augustine. Not even terrifying men who throw glasses. Especially not them, probably. I’d guess you’ve been alone in the dark your whole life.”

Augustine Costello, who did not weep, who had not wept since he was a boy, turned his face toward the window so the nurse would not see what her words had done to him.

But she saw.

Of course she saw.

Noticing things was the one gift she’d never been able to turn off.