She Saved a Bleeding Stray Dog From the Rain — Then Discovered He Was the Mafia Boss Who Had Been Betrayed and Cursed for Eight Months

Chapter 10

He walked in alone, which told Mia everything about the kind of confidence a man carries when he’s already decided how a room ends.

Viktor Draven was younger than she’d pictured — mid-thirties, expensive coat, a face that might have been handsome if it weren’t so carefully arranged into something meant to be unreadable. He looked at Kane the way you look at a debt you thought you’d already written off.

“You’re supposed to be a dog,” he said. Almost gentle. Almost regretful. “Eight months, Kane. I gave you eight months to just — stay gone. Stay quiet. Let the docks be mine without the theater of a body count.”

“You gave me eight months of gutters,” Kane said. His voice had dropped into something Mia hadn’t heard from him yet — the voice, she understood suddenly, of a man who used to run half a city’s shipping with a word. “I gave you twenty years of not asking whether you’d do this.”

“I didn’t want to.” Viktor’s hands, empty at his sides, betrayed nothing. “You made it impossible not to. You were always going to be the kind of boss men die loving. I was never going to be that. The only version of me that survives next to you is the version that removes you first.”

“So you poisoned a friend instead of just asking for a bigger cut.”

“Would you have given me one?”

Kane didn’t answer. The silence did it for him, and Viktor’s mouth twisted into something that might, in another life, have been sad.

“That’s what I thought.” He finally looked at Mia, and something in his gaze sharpened, recalculated. “And you’re the girl who fed a stray dog the good half of her dinner. Doyle’s report undersold you. You’re the reason he’s standing here instead of still chasing his tail in some alley.”

“Leave her out of it,” Kane said, and the room’s temperature seemed to drop a degree with the words.

“I would,” Viktor said, almost apologetic, “except she’s not out of it. She’s holding the other half of the exact debt that’s currently unraveling my curse. That’s not a detail I can afford to leave loose, Kane. You taught me that yourself. No loose ends.”

He reached into his coat, slow, deliberate — not for a weapon Mia could see yet, but for something smaller, a vial, glass catching the grey light.

“More Wraithroot,” Viktor said. “Concentrated, this time. Enough that there’s no eight-month clock. No slow crack.” His eyes flicked to Mia. “For both of you, if it comes to that. A matched set. Fitting, given the matched set already around your necks.”