Chapter 4 - The Poison in the Glass
Lily realized that if she told the guards, they wouldn't listen to a three-year-old girl. If she told Marcus, she would disappear just like her father did. The only person who could save them was Adrian himself—but Adrian was being systematically poisoned into a state of vegetative helplessness.
She needed to stop the medicine without alerting Dr. Vance or Marcus.
The following day, at 1:55 PM, Lily hid behind the heavy velvet curtains in Adrian’s bedroom.
Dr. Vance walked in, carrying his silver tray with the two blue-and-white capsules and a glass of water. He set the tray on the nightstand beside Adrian, who was resting his head against the high back of his chair, looking exhausted.
“Time for your dose, Adrian,” Dr. Vance said, his voice smooth and professional. “This will help with the brain inflammation.”
Adrian nodded weakly. “I feel… so tired, Harold. Every day, I feel like I’m slipping deeper into water.”
“That’s just the healing process,” Vance lied smoothly, handing him the pills.
Just as Adrian reached for the glass of water, Lily intentionally knocked over a heavy brass floor lamp near the curtain.
CLANG!
The loud crash echoed through the room. Dr. Vance jumped, startled, turning around sharply. “What was that? Who’s there?”
In that brief three-second window while Vance was turned toward the corner, Lily darted out from behind the curtain, snatched the two pills from the nightstand, and dropped two identical-looking blue-and-white candies—which she had saved from her lunch box—onto the tray.
She then dashed back into the shadows before Vance turned back around.
“It’s just the little girl, doctor,” Adrian said weakly, blinking at the corner.
Dr. Vance frowned, inspecting the corner, but saw nothing. He turned back, picked up the glass, and watched as Adrian swallowed the two candies with water.
“Rest now, Adrian,” Dr. Vance said, picking up his tray and leaving the room.
For the first time in three years, Adrian Moretti did not receive his daily dose of heavy thallium and neurotoxin compounds—the slow, undetectable poison that Vance had been administering to mimic a degenerative neurological disease.
Over the next four days, Lily repeated her trick.
On day two, she spilled a vase of flowers to distract the doctor.
On day three, she pretended to drop her stuffed rabbit out the second-story window, screaming for help until Dr. Vance ran to look.
On day four, she simply grabbed the pills off the table while Vance was looking at Adrian’s blood pressure monitor and hid them in her sock.
By the fifth day, something extraordinary began to happen.
The heavy, suffocating fog inside Adrian’s mind started to clear.
His hand stopped trembling when he picked up his fork at dinner. The dark blue discoloration under his fingernails began to fade. The overwhelming lethargy that had held him hostage for three years started to lift like morning mist over a river.
On Tuesday night, while the mansion was quiet and the guards were patrolling the perimeter, Adrian sat up in his bed.
He looked at his hands. He flexed his fingers. They moved with sharp, decisive precision.
He looked over at the doorway.
Lily was standing there, wearing her flannel pajamas, holding her stuffed rabbit by its single ear.
“Lily,” Adrian said, his voice clearer and stronger than it had been in years. “Come here.”
She walked across the room and sat on the edge of his bed.
“You’ve been taking my pills, haven’t you?” Adrian asked quietly. He was no fool; he had noticed the little girl’s subtle distractions over the past week, and he had felt his own mind waking up from a long nightmare.
Lily nodded solemnly. She reached into her pajama pocket and pulled out four blue-and-white capsules, laying them on the white bedsheet.
“They smell like bad copper,” Lily whispered. “My daddy said never drink things that smell like bitter almonds or copper. They make people go to sleep and never wake up.”
Adrian stared at the tiny capsules on his bed. His eyes narrowed, the lethal, terrifying intellect of the crime boss fully awakening behind his gray eyes.
“Who gave my father those pills?” Adrian asked softly.
“Dr. Vance,” Lily said. “And Marcus wears the silver watch.”
Adrian felt a cold, ruthless fire ignite in his chest. “What did you say about a watch?”
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Lily pulled her father’s small leather notebook from her shirt and placed it into Adrian’s hands.
“Daddy said the man with the silver watch killed the numbers,” she said. “He told me to give this to you.”
