Every Night,Stray Dog Barks at a Mafia Boss House—Until BLACK MAID Discovers What No One Not.

Chapter 3

Zora’s blood turned cold. Her hands started shaking. There was someone inside. Someone the dog had been barking about for three days. Someone locked in this building on Serrano property. Someone who was calling for help. And no one in the world was listening except for a stray dog and a maid who should know better than to be here.

She reached out to touch the door. The metal was cold. She ran her fingers over the lock, understanding without being told that this was reinforced. This was new. This was serious. Zora looked around, searching desperately for something heavy, something that could break the lock mechanism. There was a metal rod leaning against the building’s side. She grabbed it, her hands shaking now, and jammed it into the lock.

A hand grabbed her wrist. Zora spun around, her heart exploding in her chest, every nerve screaming danger. A figure stood behind her, tall and dark against the night. For a second her mind went blank with fear — pure animal fear, the fear of prey that suddenly becomes aware it’s being hunted.

Then the figure stepped into the sliver of moonlight, and she saw his face. Dominic Serrano, the man who owned this house, this property, this entire world she’d entered. The man she’d only seen once before, a week after she was hired, when his car pulled up outside. She’d seen him from a distance — an expensive suit that fit him like it had been painted on, cold eyes that seemed to see everything and value nothing, the kind of person who owned other people the way he owned furniture. His presence had made the air feel different, heavier, dangerous.

And now those eyes were on her, and his hand was on her wrist, his grip firm but not yet painful. She had no good explanation for why she was at the back of his property in the middle of the night, standing in front of a locked building, being guided by a stray dog, touching equipment she had no right to touch.

“What are you doing?” His voice was quiet. The quietness was worse than yelling would have been.

Zora’s mind scrambled for words. Lies, excuses, something. Nothing came. “The dog,” she heard herself say. Her voice sounded small, distant. “It was barking. I just wanted to see what was wrong. I thought maybe it was hurt. I thought—”

Dominic’s expression didn’t change. His eyes moved to the dog. The dog didn’t move, didn’t growl, didn’t back away — just watched him with those intelligent gray eyes, waiting, like it knew what would happen next, like it had been waiting for this moment.

“Go back inside,” Dominic said quietly. His voice carried the kind of authority that came from people who were never questioned, never challenged. “Forget you were here.”

“But the dog,” Zora started, “whatever is happening in there, they need help.”

“I said go.” There was something in that single word, something in the way his eyes hardened, something in the way his hand tightened fractionally on her wrist that told her refusing wasn’t an option. Told her that Dominic wasn’t someone who repeated himself. Told her that she was standing at the edge of something, and if she looked further, she couldn’t unsee it. She couldn’t unknow it.

He released her wrist. The absence of his touch felt like a kind of violence. She turned and walked back toward the mansion on legs that didn’t feel like they belonged to her. She didn’t look back, but she could hear the dog behind her. One more bark. Just one. Like a goodbye. Like a promise. Like a warning that everything was about to change.