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 8

Caspian Crowe was everything Silas Kane was not: smiling, golden, dressed like a magazine cover, and thoroughly, enormously dangerous. He met them at the harbor the next evening, on the deck of a yacht the size of a small cruise ship, and his grin when he saw Briar was the grin of a man finding a diamond in a parking lot.

“Briar Sloane,” Crowe said, spreading his arms. “As I live and breathe. Where have you been all these years?”

Briar went cold. She knew that voice. She knew the face behind it, the way you know a textbook you studied a lifetime ago. “Vet school,” she said. “You were in my year. Before you dropped out to go… be *this*.”

“My family had a difference of opinion about my career path,” Crowe said, delighted. “They wanted a doctor. I wanted a kingdom. We compromised.”

“Caspian,” Silas said, flat, “you’ve had your fun. She’s not your concern.”

“She was my concern before she was yours, Kane.” Crowe’s smile didn’t waver, but his eyes went cold. “We were classmates. She was the best in our year. And she disappeared off the face of the earth about eight years ago, right around the time —”

“Careful,” Silas said.

“— around the time her father’s clinic burned down,” Crowe finished, pleasantly. “Terrible tragedy. They said it was an electrical fire. They said a lot of things.”

Briar’s blood went to ice. “How do you know about my father?”

“I know everything about you, Briar. That’s why I came.” Crowe spread his hands. “You could have this. A yacht. A private jet. The whole goddamn world, on a leash. Kane’s a dog — loyal, reliable, boring. I’m offering you an adventure.”

“Loyal and reliable,” Briar said, “is exactly what I’m looking for. I’m going back with Silas.”

Crowe’s smile finally flickered. “Think about it. You have —” he glanced at Silas, coldly amused “— 48 hours.”

He stepped close to Briar, too close, and dropped his voice to a whisper that only she could hear.

“I know who ordered the fire, Briar. Come to my boat tomorrow night, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Briar went stiff. She said nothing. But Crowe saw it — the crack in her armor — and he smiled like a man who’d already won.

The ride home was silent. Silas didn’t ask, and Briar didn’t offer. She sat in the passenger seat with Lucky in her lap, staring at the dark water, and she thought about her father — the crooked clinic sign, the sleeping hound, the little hearts on every bandage — and she thought about the word *fire*, and she thought about the name *Kane*.

She was so lost in it she almost missed it when Silas said, very quietly:

“If he hurt you tonight —”

“He didn’t. He just reminded me of something I’d forgotten.”

“What?”

Briar looked at him. Gray eyes on the road. A heart stitched into his chest, under his shirt, put there by her hands. A man who’d followed her a mile to make sure she was safe, and then admitted he was too much of a coward to say what he meant.

“My father used to say,” Briar said, “that the only people who ever ask about a fire are the people who started it.”

Silas’s hands tightened on the wheel. He said nothing. And all the way home, Briar Sloane sat in the dark and watched him, and wondered why the question she was afraid to ask was also the question she was most desperate to hear answered.

Tomorrow night, she decided, she would go to Crowe’s boat.

And she would finally learn the truth about her father — no matter whose name was on it.