I Rescued the Mafia Boss’s Blind Cane Corso. I Never Expected Him to Say, “Be My Wife.”

Chapter 5

Rosa’s hands were trembling around her own cup, but her voice did not shake.

“Three days before the storm, Frank found the boys unloading a van at the back of the property. Not dogs being walked. Not deliveries.” She stopped. “They were dosing him. Preparing him. We did not know for what.”

Iris did not move. The kitchen clock ticked in the space between them.

“Frank followed one of them home,” Rosa said. “He heard enough. They were going to finish it — blind him, hurt him, leave him somewhere they could control. Somewhere they could make him a reason.” She looked at Iris. “We knew if we called it in officially, Nico would hear before the officers ever arrived. So we picked your name off the emergency roster. You were on the route. And we moved the dog to where you would find him first, before they could finish what they started.”

Iris heard herself ask the question she should have asked an hour ago. “Why didn’t you tell Enzo?”

Rosa’s smile was small and old. “With what proof? Nico is his sister’s only son. Enzo buried that sister with his own hands. He would have called it servant jealousy and sent Frank away — and we would have lost the only person inside this house who might see it in time.”

She turned her cup in her hands. “You saw the gloves. You caught the vial. We were right about you.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Nico is being confirmed as heir at the naming supper Saturday. He will not wait past that. Whatever he plans, he plans for Saturday.”

Three days.

Iris asked the question she had to ask, the one that had been pressing on her since the kit. “Why me? Out of every emergency vet on that county’s roster. Why my name, why my truck, why my kit?”

Rosa looked at her hands. “Because your license carries the vial he wants. And because you are the kind of woman he thinks he can frame — single, independent, nobody watching your paperwork but you.” She met Iris’s eyes. “He picked you the way he picks a suit, to look correct.” A pause. “He does not know that is exactly the kind of woman who counts her own turns on a cap.”

Iris did what Enzo had asked her to do. She kept watching. She also stopped sleeping.

She mapped every room in the estate against the household routines Rosa slipped her on scraps of grocery paper. She learned that on Saturday nights the main breaker for the East Wing had been serviced twice in the last month by an electrician nobody had hired. She learned that Nico had asked the kitchen, casually, whether the dog would be in the dining room. She learned that his loyal men were arriving in staggered pairs starting Friday, under the cover of security for the announcement.

She did not tell Enzo any of it yet. Not because she did not trust him. Because she understood that a man who had spent thirty years protecting the people he loved by removing choice from every room they stood in would move too soon if he knew too early. And Nico was counting on exactly that. If Enzo struck first on incomplete evidence, Nico would go to ground and try again in six months, from a room she would not be in. He had to be caught in the act, in front of the captains he wanted to inherit, using his own voice to explain his own plan. Otherwise he would always be a story a jealous veterinarian had told. And the next dog he blinded would not be lucky enough to be found.

On Friday afternoon, alone in her suite, Iris opened the compromised vial, drew off its contents into a sealed sharps container that would go home with her and nowhere else, and refilled it with sterile saline from her own stock — resealing the cap to exactly the fraction of a turn Nico had left it.

Whatever he thought he was going to use on Enzo, he was going to use salt water.

That evening, on her whispered instruction, Frank walked Orion through a new grounding command in the north pasture until the dog was answering at half-asleep. A single soft word: Down. Not the operational down Nico’s people would know. Her down — different pitch, different rhythm. Only Orion, Frank, Enzo, and Iris could produce it correctly. If Nico tried to call the dog with an old handler command from the weeks of captivity, Orion needed a newer word to override it.

Saturday came with a sky the color of pewter.