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

Chapter 6

Enzo had invited eleven people to that dinner. His three senior captains, who had come up in suits older than the ones they owned. Two elderly cousins, white-haired, polite, who had not visited the house in a year and did not know why they had been asked now. A priest from the old neighborhood, Father Aldo, who had baptized Enzo’s sister and buried her, and who sat with his hands folded on the table like a man holding his own prayer. Rosa, seated for the first time in her thirty-seven years at the family table, in a dress she had bought for a christening she had never worn it to. Frank, in a suit he clearly hated, whose collar sat wrong on his neck. Nico at Enzo’s right hand, gleaming. Iris at his left. And Orion on the rug between them — blind, calm, chewing gently on the soft toy she had put in his mouth as an anchor.

The chandelier burned low and golden. The silver had been polished until it glowed. The roast had been carved, and the wine poured, and the small talk had the careful, weightless quality of china that has been out of the cabinet too long. Iris watched the way the room changed shape around Enzo’s stillness. The way it must have changed shape around him his whole life.

Enzo rose after the second course. Wine untouched.

“I called you here tonight to name my successor,” he said. “I have decided to delay that decision.”

The room went still. A fork stopped halfway to a mouth. Rosa’s hand, on the tureen, stopped.

“Someone attacked this dog,” Enzo continued, in the same low voice. “Someone wants me to declare war on families that did not touch him. Until I know who, I will not hand this house to anyone. Blood earns you a seat at my table.” He let his eyes travel the length of the table, slow and unhurried. “It does not earn you my chair.”

Nico’s face did not move. His hand, resting on the stem of his glass, did.

The lights went out four minutes later.

It was not dark for long — maybe six seconds, the way a generator handoff feels when the main breaker is tripped by someone who knows the panel. In that first black second, Iris smelled candle smoke from the kitchen and the cooling wax of the chandelier overhead. And then she heard it: Nico’s chair scraping back. The soft, almost polite cough of a spring-loaded auto-injector. And Enzo exhaling once, sharply, a sound punched out of him, and slumping forward across his plate.

The generator caught. The chandelier came back up.

Enzo was face-down on the table. His wine glass had tipped, and the dark red had crawled across the linen like a rumor. The auto-injector was already back inside Nico’s jacket — but Iris had seen his elbow move, had seen the exact angle of it, had logged it the way she logged everything.

Nico stood. He was crying. He was very good.

“He collapsed. He just collapsed. Someone get a doctor — someone. Oh God. Uncle.”

Then, when the captains only stared, his voice hardened by exactly the degree a grieving nephew’s voice should not have hardened.

“Restrain her. Restrain the veterinarian. Check her kit. Check it now.”

Two of his men moved toward Iris. She did not move. Rosa, at the far end of the table, folded her napkin and set it beside her plate, and did not look up.

Nico produced the photographed medication logs. He held them up, turning so the whole room could see, and told them that Iris had been rejected by Enzo. That she had threatened him privately. That she had used a controlled immobilizer from her own case. He was by then so certain of the shape of the story that he could not stop telling it. He explained to the captains he wanted to inherit exactly how thoroughly he had chosen her. How he had picked her name off the emergency roster months in advance, because her license carried that specific vial. How he had ordered Orion blinded — so the dog would need her, so she would need Enzo, so she would be inside this house on this night. How he had leaked the rival evidence to keep Enzo’s eye off the family. How he had broken into her clinic so her prescription pattern would look guilty.

He told them because he thought he was already the boss. And bosses explain.

“Every coincidence of the last three weeks was my design,” Nico said — and Iris would remember that sentence until the day she died. “I did not want a war. I wanted a widow’s inheritance without the widow.”

Enzo sat up.

He did not lurch. He did not gasp. He simply raised his head from the plate, blotted his mouth with his napkin, and looked at his nephew across the length of the table with an expression Iris had only ever seen on him once before — in her clinic, when he thought no one was watching Orion breathe.

“Say it again,” Enzo said. “Louder, so the men behind you hear it.”

Nico’s men were behind him. They had heard every word.