She Promised a Crying Girl Her Dying Puppy Would Live — Then Her Mafia Boss Father Kept Returning at Midnight and Stole Her Heart
Chapter 2
The first text came at 2:03 a.m. *How is he?*
June answered with the truth: critical, stable, holding. The next came at three, then four, then five — every hour, on the hour, like a heartbeat. *Is he eating? Is he in pain? What do you need?* She answered each one, honest to the point of pain, and something strange and fragile grew in the dark of her clinic — a thread stretching between her and a man she’d known for four hours.
On the second night, after forty hours without real sleep, her phone rang instead of buzzing. “It’s Matteo. I’m outside. Can I come in?”
He wasn’t wearing the suit. Dark jeans, a black henley stretched across his shoulders, shadows under his eyes that matched hers. He carried two coffees and a paper bag from a bakery that had been closed for hours — which meant he’d gone somewhere, woken someone, to have it made. June stared at the coffees: perfect, strong, with a touch of cream, exactly how she liked it.
“I never told you how I take it.”
“I asked around.” He shrugged, almost sheepish. “Iris is loyal to you. It took a bribe.”
She laughed — a rusty, startled sound. Then she looked at Bruno in his kennel, and Matteo’s entire wall came down at once.
“She thinks I can fix anything,” he said quietly. “That’s what fathers do, right? Fix things, make everything better. But I can’t fix this. I can’t fix her mother. I can’t —” His jaw clenched. “I couldn’t even save Bruno without you.”
He looked so unlike a monster in that moment. Just a man drowning. June set her coffee down and touched his arm. “You brought her to someone who could help. That’s all any of us can do sometimes. That’s everything.”
He looked down at her hand. Then up at her face. The air between them went tight and electric in a way June had no name for. “Dottoressa,” he said softly — the Italian endearment rolled off his tongue like honey and smoke, and her stomach turned over.
His phone rang. He glanced at the screen, and his whole face changed — went flat and cold, a door slamming shut. He silenced it. “I have to go. Call me if anything changes. Anything at all.”
He pressed a business card into her hand. Simple, expensive: *Matteo Castellano.* And as he turned, the henley rode up at his ribs, and June saw the dark bloom of blood seeping through the fabric.
“Matteo,” she said. “You’re bleeding.”
He went still. For one endless second he didn’t turn around. When he finally looked back, the man she’d been talking to was gone, replaced by something older and harder and very, very dangerous.
“June.” His voice was flat. “You didn’t see that. You didn’t see me tonight. Say it.”