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 6

The house was the size of her old street. Briar spent the first night in a guest room with a bed bigger than her old apartment, refusing to believe any of it was real. In the morning she tried the front door, expecting to be locked in.

It opened.

She walked out onto the gravel drive, then the road, then the gate, which stood open. No guard stopped her. No one even looked at her. She stood in the middle of the road, alone and free, and discovered the thing she’d been running from had followed her all the way here.

The fear. The nothing. The forty-two dollars’ worth of nowhere to go.

She walked back in. Silas was standing at the kitchen island, watching her over a cup of coffee, and he didn’t say a word. He just looked at her with those gray eyes, like he’d known she’d come back. Like he’d known she’d needed to find out for herself.

“The deal,” Briar said. “Teach me. And when I can take you down, I’m out.”

“We start tonight,” Silas said.

The gym was in the basement, all black matting and heavy bags and a smell of rubber and sweat. Silas wrapped her hands himself, his fingers careful on her wrists, his knuckles brushing the base of her thumbs.

“Throw a punch. I’ll catch it.”

Briar threw a punch. It was, objectively, the worst punch in the history of punching. Silas caught it and shook his head.

“Wait,” Briar said. “Why are your arms so long?”

“Do not laugh.”

“I’m not laughing. It’s just — you’re very tall. It’s unfair. I’m at a disadvantage. Structurally.”

“You are,” Silas agreed, and caught her next punch, and the next, and the next, patient as a metronome, while Briar grew sweatier and angrier and, somehow, slightly better.

They sparred at dawn and at midnight. He taught her how to stand, how to fall, how to throw her weight through a strike instead of at it. He taught her the soft spots on a man’s body and the hard way to stop one. Somewhere in the middle of week two, Briar landed a jab on his ribs that made him grunt, and the sound was so satisfying she nearly cried.

“Again,” Silas said. “Keep that energy. Now let me show you the proper technique.”

He showed her. He always showed her, and he never — not once — went easy. She understood, finally, that this was his way of telling the truth: *I believe you can leave. I just hope you won’t.*

One night, exhausted, she found him in the kitchen with his shirt off, changing the dressing on his side.

“I can do that,” she said.

“It’s fine. It’s healing.”

“It’s infected,” Briar said, and took the roll of gauze out of his hands. He let her. She unwrapped the wound — the neat line of stitches, the red halo around them — and there it was, right across his ribs.

The heart.

Her heart. The one she’d sewn without meaning to, the one she’d been trying not to think about for three weeks. She touched it with her fingertip, feather-light, and Silas Kane went very still.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” It was almost true. “My father used to draw hearts on bandages. For frightened animals. He said a heart meant somebody’s hands had been on you, and you’d been put back together. He said that’s all anyone needs to know.”

“Was he right?”

“He’s dead,” Briar said, because it was easier than answering, and she went back to work on his ribs with hands that didn’t shake, the way he’d taught her to keep them.

Later that week, she found out why his men all moved like they’d been in a war. Flynn and Theo were in the gym, and Theo — the quiet one with the limp — had his shirt off, and his legs were a roadmap.

“Bullet,” Theo said, seeing her look. “Left leg. That’s the machete. And this one here’s from a crossbow, which you don’t hear every day.”

“Jesus,” Briar breathed. “What happened?”

“Bar fight,” Flynn said. “Forty guys. Not fourteen. He almost lost both legs going back in for us.”

Theo shrugged. “Boss said we were going to be different. Better than the rest of them. Said we weren’t going to be the kind of men who let kids get sold or let the weak get eaten. So we stopped a trafficking ring that night. The bastards got my legs. I got to keep my pride.”

Briar looked across the gym, at Silas in the doorway, watching her. And she understood, in a way that hurt to understand, why she’d stitched a heart into a stranger’s chest.

Because she’d been right about him. Because some people are worth putting back together.

“I think,” Briar said, “you’re a lot like a Doberman.”

“Is that an insult?”

“It’s a compliment. Loyal. Strong. A little terrifying.”

“A little?” Flynn muttered.

“Well,” Silas said, “luckily for this Doberman, I’m the best-fed dog in town.” And he looked at Briar like he’d just decided something enormous.