Her Dog Escaped Into The Mafia Boss’s Penthouse — She Had to Join His Family Lunch to Get Him Back

Chapter 3

The man, Matteo Conti, finally looked away from her face, down to the yapping dog at his feet. He dropped another piece of bread, which Otis devoured instantly. “He has excellent taste,” Matteo said. His voice was a low baritone, smooth with an accent she couldn’t quite place — the polished, transatlantic cadence of old money and boarding schools on two continents.

He looked back at her and gestured, with one long-fingered hand, to the single empty chair at his right. “You’ve interrupted a family lunch. Please. Sit.”

It wasn’t a request. It was a command wrapped carefully in the silks of civility. He nodded once to a hulking man stationed against the far wall, who hadn’t moved a muscle until that precise signal. “Gio. Pour the lady some wine.”

“No,” Lena stammered, shaking her head, her heart hammering against her ribs. “No, I can’t. I just need my dog. I’ll go — I’m so sorry to interrupt.” She took one desperate step toward Otis, hand outstretched.

A shadow moved to block her. A woman who had been seated near the head of the table rose with unhurried grace — the same dark hair, the same sharp cheekbones as the man, a red dress a slash of color in the otherwise dark-suited room. “You must be the neighbor,” the woman said, her smile a dazzling, perfectly cold display of white teeth. “From 9C. I’m Isabelle. Matteo’s sister.” She didn’t offer a hand. She simply stood there, a polite and immovable barrier scented with something expensive. “You can’t just run off now. You’ve interrupted the blessing.”

Lena’s eyes flew back to Matteo, that same amused, terrifying glint still lighting them. “Please,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I just want Otis back. He’s — he’s all I have.”

The admission slipped out before she could stop it, a small, pathetic truth laid bare on marble. Matteo took a slow sip of his wine and set the glass down with a soft click that seemed to echo in the room’s sudden, absolute silence. Otis, adventure apparently concluded, curled up beside Matteo’s polished shoe and closed his eyes.

“Of course you may take your dog,” Matteo said, his voice all charm, a velvet glove drawn over something considerably harder underneath. “After you’ve finished your meal.” He gestured again to the chair. “We’re in the middle of a family lunch. It would be rude of you to leave now. And it would be very rude of me” — his eyes darkened almost imperceptibly — “to let a guest go hungry. Especially a neighbor.”

The menace wasn’t in his words. It never quite was. It lived in the air around him, in the stillness of the other men, in the sharp, assessing glint in Isabelle’s eyes. Lena understood, with a clarity that turned her stomach, exactly what she had become in the space of thirty seconds. A disruption. A loose thread. She had seen something she shouldn’t have — not a crime exactly, but a family, an architecture of power she had no business glimpsing — and he would not let her leave until he had decided precisely what to do about it.

“I don’t have an appetite,” she whispered, her hands curling into fists at her sides.

“You will,” Matteo said, his voice soft but utterly final.

Her legs moved through what felt like wet cement, every instinct screaming at her to run, as she crossed to the empty chair beside the most dangerous man she had ever encountered. Gio pulled it out for her. She sank into the plush velvet. He poured a deep, blood-red wine into a crystal glass in front of her, and she stared at her own tiny, warped reflection in the surface of it.

The following hour was the longest of Lena’s life. A plate appeared silently in front of her — pasta in a rich, dark sauce, followed by fish roasted with lemon, platters of meat she had no appetite for whatsoever. The smell was overwhelming against the cold, tight knot of fear sitting in her stomach. She couldn’t lift her fork.

“Eat,” Matteo said quietly, not looking at her, cutting a piece of steak with movements as economical and precise as everything else about him.

She picked up the fork. Her hand shook so badly she could barely spear a single piece of pasta. It tasted like ash going down, but she forced herself to chew, to swallow, twice, three times, while the conversation around her resumed exactly as if a switch had been flicked back on. It was a performance. They discussed business using words that clearly meant something else entirely. An older man with a face like a worn coin mentioned a shipment delayed by customs.

Matteo took a sip of wine. “Customs is a temporary problem,” he said, his voice casual. “The rats eating the shipment from the inside are the permanent one.”

His sister laughed, a high, musical sound. “We should send a new exterminator, Matteo. The last one was clearly incompetent.”

They were not discussing pasta, and they were certainly not discussing rats. Through all of it, Lena felt Matteo’s attention on her — a thin, hot thread even as he led the conversation, made decisions, dominated the table without effort. He wasn’t staring, but he was aware of everything: the way her throat moved when she forced a swallow, the tremor in her hand around the water glass, the raw skin at her cuticles she’d worried without noticing. She felt flayed open, studied, and she wanted more than anything to disappear entirely. She had never in her life been more visible.

When Gio moved to refill her wine, she placed a hand over the glass. “No, thank you.”

Matteo turned his head, his dark eyes landing fully on her for the first time since she’d sat down. “Dessert?”