My Boss Was Pronounced Dead — Until I Climbed Onto His Freezing Autopsy Table

Part 1

The monitor flatlined at exactly 11:42 p.m.

Three world-renowned surgeons stepped away from the blood-soaked sheets.

They pronounced the most feared man in Chicago dead.

But they didn’t account for me.

I was just the quiet, overweight maid.

I slipped past the armed guards.

I carried a devotion that would defy medical science and the mob itself.

The Rossi estate was a sprawling limestone fortress isolated in the dense woods of upstate New York.

It was usually a place of terrifying, immaculate silence.

But on the night of October 14th, that silence shattered.

Tires screeched in the driveway.

Heavily armed men shouted orders.

The metallic tang of blood filled the pristine hallways.

Vincent Rossi was not just a mafia boss.

He was the undisputed king of the eastern seaboard’s underworld.

At thirty-four, he possessed a ruthless intellect.

His cold, calculating demeanor kept rival syndicates in a state of perpetual terror.

But even kings can bleed.

They carried him into the mansion’s subterranean medical wing on a reinforced stretcher.

His impeccably tailored suit was shredded.

The terrifying shade of crimson soaked through the expensive fabric.

I watched from the shadows of the grand staircase.

My name is Megan Higgins.

I am twenty-six years old.

I had worked at the estate for three years.

I am a heavy woman.

My soft curves were constantly hidden beneath a starched, oversized gray uniform.

I had to special order it.

In a world populated by the mob’s slender, glamorous wives and sharp-edged mistresses, I was utterly invisible.

The other staff whispered about my size.

Mob soldiers bumped into me without apologizing.

They treated me like a piece of cumbersome furniture.

But Vincent had been different.

He never looked at me with the thinly veiled disgust that the others did.

Once, a drunken capo had cornered me in the kitchen.

He mocked my weight relentlessly.

Vincent walked in quietly.

He placed his hand on the capo’s shoulder.

He whispered something that made the man turn pale.

That capo fled the estate and was never seen again.

Vincent had simply tipped his head to me.

He asked for a black coffee.

He walked away.

From that day on, my heart belonged to a man I could never have.

Now that man was dying.

Dr. Peter Gable roared for epinephrine.

He was a disgraced former chief of surgery who now earned seven figures keeping criminals breathing.

A team of frantic nurses flanked him.

Vincent had been caught in an ambush coordinated by a rival family.

But it wasn’t just the hollow-point bullets killing him.

The assassins had laced their rounds with an experimental synthetic neurotoxin.

It paralyzed the heart muscle.

I hovered near the swinging doors of the medical wing.

My hands clutched a feather duster to my chest like a shield.

Through the frosted glass, I watched the frantic ballet of desperate medical professionals.

The shrill, rapid beeping of the heart monitor echoed into the hall.

His core temperature was plummeting.

The toxin was crystallizing in his bloodstream.

Outside the room, the tension was combustible.

Craig Salvo paced the floor like a caged tiger.

He was Vincent’s volatile underboss.

His hands trembled as he gripped a custom pistol.

He swore that if Vincent died, the city would burn tonight.

Inside the operating theater, the situation rapidly deteriorated.

They had managed to extract the bullets.

But the neurotoxin had taken total control.

Vincent’s skin had turned the color of bruised ash.

His lips were blue.

The frantic rhythm of the heart monitor began to slow.

The spaces between the sharp beeps stretched into agonizing voids.

The defibrillator cracked through the room.

Vincent’s body arched off the table.

A violent spasm yielded nothing.

Again, the violent jolt.

Again, nothing.

The beeping stopped.

A single uninterrupted high-pitched tone filled the sterile room.

I gasped.

My hand clamped over my mouth to stifle a sob.

I pressed my face against the cold glass.

Dr. Gable initiated manual CPR.

He pressed down on the boss’s chest with brutal force.

Ribs cracked in a desperate bid to force the heart to pump.

He worked for ten agonizing minutes.

Finally, another doctor placed a gentle hand on Gable’s shoulder.

The toxin had completely paralyzed the myocardium.

It was over.

Time of death was 11:42 p.m.

The words seeped through the glass.

They hit me like a physical blow.

The invincible Vincent Rossi was dead.

When Dr. Gable emerged from the operating theater, his face said it all.

Craig let out a roar of anguish.

Pandemonium broke out.

Phones were dialed.

Weapons were cocked.

The house erupted into a frenzy of grief and impending warfare.

The doctors instructed the guards to seal the medical wing.

The body needed to be preserved.

The temperature in the room dropped to near freezing.

This would slow down rigor mortis before the cleaners arrived at dawn.

In the chaos of shifting power, the medical wing was abandoned.

And in that chaotic void, I saw my chance.

By 2:00 a.m., the mansion above ground was a war room.

No one was paying attention to the basement.

No one was paying attention to the weeping maid.

I quietly keyed in the access code to the medical suite.

I had memorized it from watching the doctors over the years.

The heavy steel door clicked open.

I slipped inside.

The operating theater was terrifyingly cold.

The industrial air conditioning turned the room into a makeshift morgue.

Only the dim blue glow of the backup generators illuminated the space.

In the center of the room lay Vincent.

He had been cleaned.

His chest was sutured and bandaged.

A thin, sterile white sheet covered him.

He looked like a fallen marble statue.

Tears streamed down my flushed cheeks.

My heavy footsteps broke the suffocating silence.

I reached out.

My trembling, plump fingers brushed against his cheek.

It was like touching ice.

The doctors had said the poison caused hypothermic shock.

The freezing room was only accelerating the deep freeze of his tissues.

A primal, overwhelming wave of grief washed over me.

I couldn’t leave him like this.

He shouldn’t be cold.

My mind screamed irrationally.

Without overthinking the sheer insanity of my actions, I stood up.

I unbuttoned my heavy gray maid’s uniform.

It pooled around my ankles.

I stood in only my thick cotton undergarments.

I was profoundly self-conscious of my large body.

But right now, that body was a furnace of natural heat.

I carefully climbed onto the wide surgical table.

The metal groaned slightly under my weight.

I lay down beside the fallen mafia boss.

I pulled the thin sheet over both of us.

I wrapped my arms around him.

I pressed my large, soft body flush against his rigid frame.

I threw my heavy leg over his.

I buried my face into his neck.

I pulled him against my deep, pillowy curves.

I wrapped him in a cocoon of human body heat.

For hours, the room remained silent.

I shivered violently for the first hour.

His freezing skin fought against my warmth.

But I was a large woman.

My core temperature was a relentless radiating force.

What the brilliant doctors hadn’t realized was the precise nature of the neurotoxin.

It required a dropping core temperature to fully crystallize.

By dropping the room’s temperature, Dr. Gable had unknowingly sealed Vincent’s fate.

But my profound, relentless body heat was creating a localized organic incubator.

The heat slowly penetrated his skin.

It warmed the blood in his superficial veins.

I clung to him with a desperate, crushing embrace.

My tears dried on his skin.

My deep, rhythmic breathing slightly compressed and expanded his chest mechanically.

By 6:00 a.m., the first faint rays of dawn peeked through the high frosted basement windows.

I was half asleep.

My limbs ached from holding the awkward position.

But I refused to let go.

Then, against my chest, I felt a flutter.