Her introduction to Nico Alfieri lasted less than a minute. He sat beside a library window in a custom wheelchair, broad-shouldered despite eight months of rehabilitation, dark hair pushed back from a face sharpened by pain. He looked at her as if evaluating a business offer.
“You’re the fourth nurse.” “So I’ve heard.” “Don’t try to make me like you.” “I wasn’t planning to.” His eyebrows rose. “I’ll manage your medication, coordinate with physical therapy, monitor your symptoms, assist when necessary, and stay out of whatever is none of my business.” For the first time, the corner of his mouth moved. Barely. “Good.”
Their arrangement began there. Nico hated assistance — the transfer board, the shower chair, anybody standing behind his wheelchair without asking. Most of all, he hated the silence that fell over rooms when he entered. Before the accident, silence had meant respect. Afterward, it meant people were checking how much of him remained. Adeline learned quickly that pity irritated him more than pain. So she gave him none.
“Again,” she said during morning exercises. And day by day, the man who trusted no one began to notice the one person in his house who treated him like a man instead of a tragedy.
What Adeline didn’t know then was that someone in that house had been tampering with Nico’s medication — and that the night of the engagement party, when she caught Camille Ashcroft’s wrist in midair, she was stepping into the middle of something far more dangerous than a slap.