Six nurses had quit in five weeks because of the man I was being paid $10,000 a week to keep alive. One fled his mansion sobbing so hard she left her winter coat behind, another threatened to sue, and now I was walking straight into his bedroom knowing only one thing: Liam Mercer supposedly ruled half the city, but he couldn’t even walk himself to the bathroom.

By Sunday morning, the atmosphere inside the mansion had transformed from a gloomy hospice into a pressure cooker waiting to explode.

I stood beside Liam's bed at 6:00 AM, preparing his morning antibiotic infusion. The room was bathed in the soft gray light of early dawn filtering through the sheer curtains.

Liam was awake, watching me silently. Over the last forty-eight hours, a strange, unspoken truce had formed between us. He stopped throwing things. He stopped cursing at me. In return, I stopped treating him like a fragile patient and started treating him like a commander preparing for a siege.

I picked up the fresh 500ml bag of IV saline mixed with Ampicillin that had been delivered to the estate’s pharmacy vault an hour prior by the private courier service.

I raised the clear plastic bag to the light to check for particulate matter—a habit drilled into me by five years of trauma nursing.

I froze.

The liquid inside the bag wasn't completely crystal clear. Near the injection port at the bottom of the bag, a subtle, milky swirl hung suspended in the solution, barely visible unless held directly against a light source.

My stomach dropped into a cold abyss.

"Clara?" Liam asked, noticing the sudden rigidity in my shoulders. "What is it?"

"Don't move," I whispered.

I set the bag down on the stainless steel tray, pulled a sterile 10cc syringe from my kit, and drew 2ml of the milky liquid from the IV port. I brought it over to the small vanity table in the corner where I had set up a basic diagnostic kit.

I dropped a reagent chemical onto the fluid. Within three seconds, the clear liquid turned a dark, murky purple.

Potassium chloride. Concentrated dose.

If I had hooked that IV bag up to Liam’s neck line, his heart would have gone into fatal ventricular fibrillation within ninety seconds. It would have looked like a sudden, massive cardiac arrest—a completely plausible death for a man recovering from severe surgical trauma and internal bleeding.

"What is it, Clara?" Liam’s voice slammed across the room, lower this time, packed with lethal tension.

I turned around, holding the purple test tube in my gloved hand. "Someone put three thousand milligrams of potassium chloride into your antibiotic bag."

Liam didn't flinch. His eyes narrowed into two slits of liquid ice. "The courier?"

"Or someone inside the house who intercepted the delivery," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs. "The vault key is held by Leo, but the night guard on duty at the south gate has access to the delivery drop-box."

"Vance," Liam spat the name like poison. "Vance was hired by Marcus Kane three years ago. I kept him on the perimeter because I wanted to watch him."

"He just tried to murder you, Liam!" I hissed, stepping over to the bed and grabbing his shoulders. "If I hadn't checked that bag, you would be dead right now!"

Liam looked up at me. His face was inches from mine. I could feel the heat radiating from his skin, smell the dark scent of cedar and mint on his breath. His large, calloused hand reached up, gently closing around my wrist—not with the aggressive force he had used on my first night, but with a firm, protective warmth that sent a shiver down my spine.

"You saved my life, Clara," he whispered softly, his blue eyes searching my face with a devastating sincerity that took my breath away. "A girl who came here just for ten thousand dollars cash."

"I saved your life because my brother needs you alive," I said, though the words sounded hollow even to my own ears. My heart was beating for a completely different reason now.

"No," Liam said softly, his thumb gently stroking the inner pulse point of my wrist. "You saved me because you're not like them. You don't see a mob boss. You don't see money. You see a man."

I swallowed hard, unable to break eye contact with him. The danger surrounding us seemed to evaporate, leaving only the magnetic, intoxicating pull between two people who had both been forged in fire.

"We can't let them know we found the poison," I said, pulling my professional composure back around myself like a shield. "If Marcus Kane thinks his plan failed, he'll send a hit squad through the gates tonight. We have to make him think it worked."

A dark, brilliant smile spread across Liam's face.

"You want to play dead, nurse?" he asked, his voice laced with dangerous amusement.

"I want to give you twenty-four hours to learn how to pull a trigger again," I replied, stepping back and opening the bedside drawer where Leo had stowed Liam’s custom Kimber .45 pistol.