A Poor Vet Took In a Dying Stray Dog — Hours Later, She Discovered the Wounded Man She Saved Was the Mafia Boss Who Owned Him

Chapter 10

Briar didn’t cry when she heard it. She stood very still, holding the front door open, and felt the clinic tilt around her like a ship hitting a wave.

“His — his *fiancée*.”

“Engaged,” Mara said, pleasantly. “For years. A business arrangement, of course — but arrangements become real things, don’t they? When they’ve had years to settle.”

“The engagement isn’t real,” Silas said, from behind Briar, and his voice was flat as a blade. “It was my father’s debt. A contract he signed before he died, giving the Vances the Kane name in exchange for money the family owed. I never agreed to it, Mara, and I’m not going to honor it.”

“Then we’ll take it to the family council,” Mara said, and for the first time there was steel in her voice. “My father has been patient. But the contract is signed, Silas. You can’t break it by wishing it away.”

“Watch me.”

Briar watched the two of them — two beautiful, ruthless people, arguing over a marriage that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with money — and she understood, with a clarity that felt like a knife, that she had walked into a world she didn’t belong to.

“I’m going to go,” she said quietly.

“Briar —”

“No. Really. This is — you have a life, Silas. A world. I’m a vet with forty-two dollars and a stolen dog. I shouldn’t be here.”

“You should be *exactly* here,” Silas said, and the rawness in his voice stopped her in the doorway. “You’re the first real thing in my life, Briar. The first thing that isn’t a debt or a deal or a war. I stitched myself shut for fifteen years, and you opened me with a rabbit scalpel and drew a heart on the inside. You don’t get to walk away from that.”

“I didn’t draw a heart on the inside of you. I drew it on the outside.”

“Then you don’t know what I look like from the inside.”

Briar stood in the doorway of her clinic, one foot toward freedom, one foot toward him, and the two halves of her life pulled her apart until she couldn’t breathe.

The phone rang. It was Crowe.

“Kane,” Crowe said, cheerful as ever. “I hear the Vances are making a move. Interesting timing — I was just about to make one of my own. I’ve got your girl’s answer waiting on my boat. And I’ve got the fire investigation report too, if you want to know who ordered it. Come alone. Tonight. Or I’ll take her, the report, and the whole goddamn clinic, in that order.”

The line went dead.

Silas turned to look at Briar. Behind him, Mara’s smile had gone thin and sharp.

“Don’t,” Briar said. “Don’t go. It’s a trap.”

“It’s a chance to end this,” Silas said. “All of it. The contract. The fire. Crowe. You.”

“If it’s a trap, you’ll die.”

“Then at least I’ll die knowing I had a reason to.”

Briar looked at the man who’d eaten a bullet for her, who’d followed her a mile to keep her safe, who’d bought her a clinic and a hundred dogs and a future. And she made a decision she would never forgive herself for.

“If you go,” she said, “I go with you.”

“No.”

“Silas —”

“No.” He crossed the room in two strides and took her face in his hands, and for a second the world stopped. “You stay. You’re the one thing I want to come home to. If you’re not here when I get back, then there was never any point to any of it.”

He kissed her. It was not a gentle kiss. It was the kind of kiss you give when you’re not sure you’re coming back.

Then Silas Kane walked out into the night, and Briar Sloane stood in the middle of her empty clinic, with Lucky pressed against her legs, and realized she’d just let the only man she’d ever loved walk into a war alone.

She didn’t know the trap had already sprung.

At the end of the block, three cars idled with their lights off. Crowe had never intended to wait for the boat. He’d intended for Silas to leave her unguarded.

The back door of the clinic swung open.

And the lights went out.