A Vet Saved a Mafia Boss’s Dying German Shepherd at Midnight — Then Discovered the Owner Was the Boy Who Stole Her First Kiss and Vanished 14 Years Ago
Chapter 3
“Nick,” Jerry whispered without moving his lips. “Dominic, short version. Keep up.”
“Why didn’t you say goodbye?” The amusement had gone out of Jen’s voice now. “One night, and the house was just empty. You didn’t even—”
“I know.” He let the words land without dressing them up. “I was going to call. My father had just died and everything fell apart at once, and I—” He stopped, something crossing his face briefly before he pulled it back. “I’m really glad to see you.”
Their eyes held for a moment, a silence with weight in it. Tom and Jerry stood eighteen inches away with the concentrated expressions of men watching a sport they’d never seen and couldn’t score. Caesar solved the stalemate by stepping between them and throwing up on the floor.
“Oh, god.” Jen was already moving. “I need to take him in right now.”
“Is surgery actually necessary?” Nick looked at the floor, then at her, recalculating.
“Absolutely.” She snapped on fresh gloves, all business now. “Whatever he swallowed isn’t moving on its own.” A flicker of amusement crossed her face. “Slime, apparently. You have slime in your apartment.”
Nick’s eyebrows rose. He turned to look at Jerry, who spread both hands wide. “Nothing to add.”
“Sign the intake form. Leave your ID and wait here.” She had Caesar’s lead and the surgery room door open. “All three of you.”
The door swung shut. Caesar’s claws clicked across tile, then nothing. Nick turned around, his hand closing around Jerry’s arm, quiet and deliberate. “She knows nothing about me. That stays. No shop talk, no weapons, and the thing Caesar swallowed — that’s yours. You left it somewhere you shouldn’t have. Nothing to do with me. Are we clear?”
“Sure. Whatever you say, boss.”
“My name.” His eyes moved between them. “Not boss. Not here. Not ever in front of her.”
Tom processed this carefully. “What do we call you, then? Nick?”
Jerry’s face lit up. “Easy. We’ve got this. Don’t even—”
Nick looked at him with the expression of a man reconsidering several life choices.
“Actually,” Jerry said, arriving at the obvious conclusion somewhat late, “maybe I talk less.”
Forty minutes later, the surgery room door opened. Jen came out in fresh scrubs and set a small steel tray on the counter. Caesar was going to be fine — he’d need to stay the night, drink plenty of water, and whoever had been supervising his choices lately should take a long, hard look in the mirror. Then she picked the item up from the tray with one gloved hand and held it up. It had been used. It was still tied. And printed on the side, in the confident font of a company that believed in its product, were the letters X and L.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“Not slime,” Jen said.
Nick turned to Jerry with the expression of a man who had been handed a golden opportunity and intended to use it fully. “Jerry.”
Jerry shook his head slowly, with great sorrow. “I told you to watch what Caesar gets into. I told you. It was a heated moment. Things got away from me.”
Tom looked at Jerry, then at the item, then at Jerry again, with the slow, methodical attention of a man working through a math problem he hadn’t been asked to solve. “Big hands,” he said finally, and nodded, apparently satisfied.
The sound Jen made was not quite a laugh. “A heated moment,” she repeated pleasantly.
“Very heated. Right?”
She looked at Nick, who was standing slightly apart from the other two with his arms crossed and something around his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile but lived in the same building. “You’re Caesar’s father. Who you leave him with is your responsibility.”
“Completely agree.” He looked at Jerry with the particular patience of a man who was going to have a very thorough conversation later.
Jen slid the intake form across the counter. “Sign here. I’ll take a copy of your ID, and you’re done.”
Nick signed. Then he reached into his jacket and paused — not the pause of a man who had forgotten something, but the pause of a man who had just decided he was going to say he had. “I left it in the car.”
“Then go get it. We’re not going anywhere.”
“I meant home, actually.” He met her eyes with a straight face, green and entirely steady, as though the correction had always been part of the sentence. “Bring it when you pick him up tomorrow. That works.”
It didn’t escape her that he’d steered the whole conversation somewhere new without her permission. “I will.” The corner of his mouth shifted, and something in his expression settled into a register she remembered from a long time ago — easy, unhurried, aimed directly at her. “I still can’t believe it, Jen.”
They’d both drifted forward over the counter at some point, neither quite noticing when. “You’re not wearing glasses.”
“Contacts.”
“You don’t have braces anymore.”
“Fourteen years, Nick. Your teeth.” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Look really good, actually.”
She held his gaze. “Yours did, too. Even back then.”
Three feet away, Tom and Jerry’s heads were turning back and forth with the synchronized patience of two men watching a tennis match they couldn’t score. Jerry leaned two inches toward Tom. “Are we supposed to step outside?”
Tom said nothing, which was his answer to most things.
“Because we have pizza delivery—” Jerry stopped mid-word as though someone had found his off switch.
“Pizza delivery,” Jen repeated slowly. “Nick. Are you in food service?”
He was quiet for exactly one second. Then something shifted behind his eyes, quick and private, and the answer he’d been about to give became a different one. “Actually, yes. I own a pizza place.”
“You own a pizza place.”
“Good margins. Surprisingly good, actually.”
Jerry stepped forward with the energy of a man who had been waiting for his moment. “We also export to—”
Nick turned his head toward Jerry with a look that could have stopped a clock. Jerry registered it, weighed it, decided against it. “Italy,” he finished.
“You export pizza to Italy.”
“It’s a long story.” Nick picked up his copy of the intake form. “We should let you sleep. Thank you for Caesar. Noon tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here.”
He held her gaze one second past the end of the sentence, and something in that extra second said more than the words did. Then he turned for the door. Tom and Jerry fell into step behind him without being asked, one to his left, one to his right, half a pace back, and the three of them walked out into the empty street.
Jen stood at the window, a smile on her face she hadn’t entirely decided to put there. She turned to Cleo. “The nerdy kid with the glasses grew up to be that attractive?” Cleo meowed. Jen lifted one shoulder. “Strange, though. He really doesn’t look like someone who works in pizza.”
On the sidewalk, the smile didn’t follow Nick out of the clinic. The three of them moved with the formation of people who have spent enough time together that movement becomes a shared language.
“Boss.” Jerry tilted his head with the air of a man expecting a trophy. “We played that pretty well in there, didn’t we?”
Nick kept his eyes on the street. “Are your weapons loaded?”
The question landed like a bucket of cold water on a man who had just been very proud of himself. Tom’s hand moved toward his jacket. “Yes, boss.”
Jerry blinked, recalibrated. “Always.”
“Good.” Three steps of silence. “Jerry. Did you have to say pizza delivery?”
“Boss, we always call a shipment a pizza delivery. It’s been the system since—”
“Tomorrow morning, first thing, you’re buying me a pizza shop.”
Tom stopped walking. “A real pizza shop, boss?”
“A real one. Good neighborhood. Somewhere people actually go for the food. There should be a room in the back. A private door that locks.”
Something lit up behind Jerry’s eyes. “New base, clean cover. Nobody looks twice at a pizza place. Nobody suspects a pizza place.”
“In New York,” Nick said, “everyone suspects a pizza place. They just don’t care. As always, Jerry. Incredibly smart.”
The SUVs pulled out into the empty street. In the doorway of the building across the road, two men stood without moving. One of them raised a phone.