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 4

Forty-eight hours passed. Briar Sloane didn’t sleep more than an hour at a time. She fed Lucky scraps and called in sick to the shelter, which meant she’d work double shifts later and Director Ellery would make a note of it, and the note would cost her something. Notes always did.

She couldn’t go home to her rental. The men had seen her face, and worse, they’d seen her with the dog. Every shadow on the canal path was a gunman now. Every passing car was an execution. She crouched in the back room of the shelter with the recovery kennels, sleeping on a blanket under a hissing heater, and told herself it was only until things calmed down.

Things did not calm down.

“Heard about your new man,” Otis said, catching her in the stairwell of the building she’d fled — she’d only come back for her clothes. He smelled of gin and old sweat, and he had her blocked against the railing. “Real satisfied customer, from the sound of it. Couldn’t sleep for the moaning all night.”

“That was — that wasn’t —” Briar’s face went hot. The surgery. The screaming. Otis had heard the screaming through the walls and decided it was something else, because Otis always decided everything was something else. “It wasn’t a man. It was a dog.”

“Sure it was, sweetheart.” His hand closed on her wrist, and Briar’s stomach turned over. “You know, I’ve been patient. But your rent’s two weeks late, and I hear the shelter’s about to let you go, and I’m starting to think we could work something out —”

“Don’t touch me.”

“— something friendly.”

Briar wrenched her arm free. She was shaking. Otis smiled with the loose, patient smile of a man who believed he’d win eventually, and that belief was the scariest thing in the world.

She took her bag and left the building, and she did not look back. She told herself she was done with that place, done with that man. She told herself a lot of things. She was very good at telling herself things.

At the shelter, Director Ellery delivered the real blow.

“Payday,” Briar said, opening the envelope that had been slid across the desk. She’d planned it for weeks. First check, she’d finally get out of the rooming house, into a real apartment, somewhere with a door that locked and a window that opened. Somewhere safe. She ripped the envelope open and held up — nothing. A slip of paper.

“Oh, thank you, everyone,” Ellery was saying to a cluster of volunteers, all smiles, the director’s bright eyes scanning the room. “Keep up the good work, we’re so close to our adoption goal —”

“Director.” Briar held up the slip. “Did you forget something?”

“Forget?” Ellery turned, and the smile didn’t so much fall as click off. “I thought you understood, dear. Living here isn’t free. Your last two weeks of work covered your room and board. If you need cash, go rob a bank.”

“Rob a — you can’t. I *worked.* I’ve worked every day. That’s my money.”

“Your room and board,” Ellery said, pleasantly, “was the money. We’re done here. Please close the door.”

Briar closed the door. She leaned against the wall in the hallway, and for a long moment she couldn’t find air. Broke. Homeless. Hiding from killers who’d seen her face. And the one place she’d thought was safe — the only family she had left, the shelter, the dogs — was just another landlord in a nicer coat.

That night, she sat in the dark of the recovery room with her arms around Lucky, and she asked the universe the only question she had left.

“Why did you send him to me if you were just going to take everything else?”

Lucky whined. Lucky didn’t know either.

Through the blinds, headlights swept across the parking lot. Then another set. Then another.

Briar froze. Three black SUVs, no headlights left on, idling in the dark like a row of sleeping sharks. Doors opened. Men in dark suits stepped out, spread across the lot with the professional patience of people who had done this a thousand times.

And one of them — tall, broad-shouldered, moving with a strange carefulness, one hand pressed to his ribs under his jacket — stopped at the fence and looked directly at the recovery-room window.

Briar’s heart stopped.

It was him. The man from the table. The heart she’d sewn. Standing in her parking lot, in the rain, looking at her like he’d been looking for her his whole life.

“There you are,” Silas Kane said, though he was too far away to be heard. His lips shaped the words anyway.

And Briar Sloane, who had saved his life and stolen his dog and stitched a heart into his chest, did the only thing that made any sense at all.

She hid under the kennel table with Lucky pressed against her, and waited.