My Ruthless Mafia Husband Won’t Let Me Go

Chapter 3

I stared at those words for a long time.

I recognized his handwriting; each stroke ended with too much pressure, as if he were holding something in.

I suddenly recalled the strength of his arms when he carried me back to bed last night. He had held me so tightly—clearly, he had been reluctant to let me go.

I folded the note, placed it in the drawer, and splashed water on my face to clear my head.

Before last night's intimacy, I had been in the lab studying a special poisonous vine smuggled across the border from Latin America, codenamed Viper's Kiss.

The vines concealed fine thorns. Once the skin was broken and the toxin entered the body, the blood would gradually diffuse into an eerie pale blue, and the victim would be overcome by feverish heat and physical cravings similar to those induced by a euphoric drug.

If too much of the toxin entered the body, the victim would bleed from all seven orifices within an hour and die a violent, agonizing death.

Recently, a series of bizarre deaths had occurred within the gang. The symptoms of the deceased closely matched the effects of the poison vine. Dante had been secretly investigating this crisis of poison killings lurking in the underworld.

I didn't want to remain an outsider, shielded from the storm by him and reduced to tending petri dishes. I wanted to use my botanical knowledge to help him find a breakthrough in the case.

Last night, to test the potency, I had lightly touched the vine's sap. My body was soon overwhelmed by the feverish toxin.

I had originally intended to use intimacy to relieve the heat inside me, but the toll the toxin took on my body far exceeded my expectations, leaving me exhausted after just one brief round.

I didn't want to throw away two years of being cherished in this marriage.

I carefully folded the lingerie originally meant to bring us closer together and placed it in my bag, then took the lab notebook containing data on the Viper's Kiss vine samples, and drove toward the heavily guarded gang headquarters.