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 7

“Should I let her go?” Silas asked, standing at the gate, watching Briar walk away down the road.

Flynn nearly choked. “Boss. You just — you *just* taught her how to break a man’s wrist. And you’re asking me whether you should let her wander off alone? She’s got your dog. She’s got the whole world looking for her. And you’re asking me —”

“She wants to leave,” Silas said. “So she can leave.”

Flynn opened his mouth. Closed it. “You’re not going to follow her, are you?”

Silas didn’t answer. He was already moving.

Briar walked a mile before she heard the footsteps. Not close — a measured distance, the way you walk behind someone you’re keeping an eye on. She turned. There was nobody. She walked another half mile. The footsteps matched her pace. She stopped dead.

“Why would you still be protecting me?” she called, at the empty road. “You said I could leave. You *let* me leave. So why are you following me?!”

A long silence. Then, from the shadow of an old wall:

“Because I want you to stay. And I’m too much of a coward to say it to your face.”

Briar’s heart turned over. She opened her mouth to answer —

And the van came around the corner so fast it clipped the curb, and the doors flew open, and there were hands, three of them, four, dragging her off her feet, a hand clamped over her mouth, the smell of sweat and cigarettes —

“Leave my woman alone!” — and then the world went very loud.

Silas Kane came out of the dark like something out of a nightmare. Briar saw it in pieces: the man holding her screaming, the flash of movement, bodies hitting the asphalt, the driver’s door opening and the driver not making it two steps. She hit the ground on her knees, scrambled backward, and then Silas was there, crouched in front of her, blood on his knuckles, breathing hard.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded.

“I’m fine. I’m fine, I — they were — how did you know?”

“I never let you leave,” Silas said. “Not really. I followed you from the gate. I would have followed you anywhere.”

Briar stared at him. Her hands were shaking. Her whole body was shaking. She’d been so close — another thirty seconds and she’d have been gone, a body in a ditch, another crime statistic nobody would ever connect to the name Kane.

“Take me back,” she whispered. “Take me home.”

Silas helped her up. He kept his arm around her the whole way back, and Briar let him, because she was too tired and too scared and too something else — too *something* — to argue. Lucky met them at the gate, whining, and pressed its nose into her hand like it, too, had been afraid.

That night, Silas’s phone rang. He looked at the screen and went very still.

“What is it?” Briar asked.

“Caspian Crowe’s people,” Silas said slowly, “are asking questions about you.”