Chapter 16 - Race Against Time
The world stopped.
The heavy mahogany desk, the import logs, the syndicate wars—everything dissolved into nothingness. Dileia felt the breath knocked entirely out of her lungs as if she had been hit by a freight train.
"Toby," she choked out, her legs trembling so violently she almost collapsed.
Before she could hit the floor, Adriano was by her side, his arm catching her waist with iron strength. But his face had gone completely white—not with fear, but with a cold, terrifying fury that promised total annihilation.
"Where is he?" Adriano demanded of Mrs. Higgins, his voice shaking the glass in the study windows.
"The medical suite on the ground floor!" the housekeeper cried. "The private doctor is already there, but—but his heart rate is dropping, sir!"
Dileia didn't wait. She bolted down the grand staircase, her bare feet pounding against the marble floor like drumbeats of pure panic.
When she burst into the private medical ward, she found the family doctor frantically injecting a dose of emergency epinephrine into Toby’s arm. Her little brother lay pale and motionless on the examination table, his breathing shallow and rattling.
"What happened?" Dileia fell to her knees beside the table, grabbing Toby’s ice-cold hand.
"Organophosphate poisoning," the doctor said, sweat dripping down his forehead as he monitored the heart monitor’s erratic spikes. "It was in the juice pitcher in the kitchen. A slow-acting neurotoxin. Someone wanted him dead, Dileia."
Adriano walked into the room a second later. He didn't shout. He didn't break anything. He walked over to the tray holding the empty glass pitcher, dipped the tip of his finger into the residual liquid, and touched it to his tongue.
He tasted it for less than a second before spitting it out into a basin.
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"It's not a Verhoven poison," Adriano whispered, his voice dangerously low. "It's imported from the Sicilian supply lines. Only one person in my inner circle had clearance to requisition medical-grade neurotoxins from our Italian pharmaceutical fronts."
Dileia looked up, her tear-filled eyes burning with pure vengeance. "Who?"
