Dog Cub Begged a Mafia Boss for Help — What He Did Next Shocked Everyone!
Chapter 2
The tan puppy never left Alexander’s side during the entire eighteen-minute drive.
It sat pressed against his leg on the leather back seat while Lionel navigated the Bentley through Manchester traffic with a skill that probably violated several laws. It didn’t tremble. Didn’t whimper. Didn’t do any of the things a normal ten-week-old puppy would do in a speeding car with a dying sibling nearby.
It just watched.
Watched Alexander’s hands, white-knuckled around the small body wrapped in his jacket. Watched the road through the windshield as if calculating distance and time. Watched the white puppy’s chest for any sign of breath.
Alexander felt the white puppy’s heartbeat against his palm. Faint. Irregular. Each beat a question that might not have an answer.
He found himself whispering things he hadn’t said since his daughter died six years ago.
“Hold on. Stay with me. You’re going to be all right. Just hold on.”
The merger was collapsing right now. He knew it. Without his signature, without his presence on that call, the Tokyo investors would walk. Four hundred million pounds. Three years of work. His board of directors would have him removed within a month. His reputation would never recover.
He was watching his empire crumble in real time while holding a dying puppy in a soaking-wet Savile Row suit.
He didn’t care.
He couldn’t explain it. He just didn’t care.
They reached the veterinary hospital in eighteen minutes. Alexander was out of the car before it fully stopped. The tan puppy stayed with him, trotting beside his leg as he pushed through the glass doors.
“Emergency,” Alexander said to the receptionist. His voice came out rough, broken in ways he hadn’t heard since the hospital room six years ago. “This puppy is dying. Please.”
The woman’s face changed instantly. She hit a button and spoke into her headset. Within seconds, a woman with red hair pulled back in a tight ponytail emerged from the back. She took one look at the white puppy in Alexander’s arms, and her professional calm cracked for just a moment.
“How long has it been down?” Dr. Jamie Fields asked, already moving toward the treatment area.
“I don’t know. I found it maybe twenty minutes ago. It’s barely breathing. The leg is broken.”
“Come with me.”
Alexander followed her through double doors into a brightly lit room that smelled of disinfectant and fear. Dr. Fields took the white puppy and placed it on a steel table. Two veterinary nurses materialized immediately, pulling equipment, preparing instruments. Alexander watched them work with practiced efficiency—cutting away his jacket, placing an oxygen mask over the puppy’s small face, inserting an IV line into a leg that looked impossibly thin.
“Severe hypothermia,” Dr. Fields said, reading a thermometer. “Core temperature is twenty-nine degrees Celsius. Normal is thirty-eight to thirty-nine. This puppy has been in the cold and wet for at least forty-eight hours. Probably longer.”
*Forty-eight hours.*
The exact window of Alexander’s Tokyo deadline.
The exact amount of time he’d been telling himself the merger mattered more than anything else in the world.
“The leg fracture is bad, but survivable,” Dr. Fields continued. “The hypothermia is going to kill it in the next ten minutes if we can’t get the temperature up.”
“Do whatever you need to do,” Alexander said. “Money isn’t a concern.”
Dr. Fields looked at him, and something in her gaze shifted—a recognition, perhaps, that this man in his ruined suit understood what was at stake.
“It’s not about money right now. It’s about time.”
She turned to her team. “Warm IV fluids, heating pads, wrap the body. Let’s move.”
They moved him out of the treatment room.
Alexander found himself standing in the waiting area with the tan puppy sitting at his feet. Both of them staring at the closed door.
His phone was ringing. He pulled it out and saw seventeen missed calls. Messages flooding in—his executive assistant, his lawyers, the Tokyo team, the board chairman.
He put the phone back in his pocket without answering any of them.
The puppy at his feet looked up at him.
Alexander sat down on the floor in his ruined trousers, and the puppy immediately climbed into his lap. It was trembling. Not from cold. From exhaustion. From fear. From the weight of having carried an impossible burden alone for *too long.*
Alexander put his hand on its small back.
“You did everything right,” he told the puppy. “You found help. You brought me to your brother. Whatever happens now, you did everything exactly right.”