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 11
Kane moved between Mia and Viktor without a word, the same instinct that had once thrown him off a rooftop into three grown men in an alley now planting his body like a wall between a poison and the only person who’d ever asked him for nothing.
“You’ll have to go through me,” Kane said, “and we both know what happens when I’m not holding back anymore.”
“You’re still weak from the transformation.” Viktor’s voice had lost its gentleness now, sharpened into something colder, more familiar to the man who’d once run half the western docks through fear alone. “I gave you eight months to lose everything that made you dangerous.”
“You gave me eight months to learn exactly what I was fighting for.” Kane’s hand found Mia’s, briefly, a grip more promise than comfort. “That’s worse for you. Fear made me careful. This makes me certain.”
Viktor’s thumb found the vial’s stopper.
What happened next took less than four seconds, and Mia would spend the rest of her life unable to describe it as anything other than *the moment the dog and the don became the same creature at once* — Kane’s shape didn’t fully change, not the way it had on the bathroom floor, but something in him surged forward with a speed no fully human body should carry, closing the distance before Viktor’s hand finished the motion of uncorking the vial.
The vial shattered against the dock office’s concrete floor, harmless, its contents soaking uselessly into dust that had waited eleven years for exactly this kind of ending.
Kane had Viktor by the collar, backed hard against the same desk that still held his father’s coffee cup, and for one long moment the only sound in the room was both men breathing.
“Kill me,” Viktor said, quietly, no fight left in his voice, only the flat exhaustion of a man who’d spent eight months waiting for this exact confrontation and found, now that it had arrived, he had no more moves left to make. “It’s what I’d do.”
“That’s the difference between us,” Kane said. “It’s why the docks were always going to be mine, and never yours.”
He didn’t kill him. He held him there, immovable, while Mia — hands shaking, voice steadier than she felt — made the call that mattered, the one Kane’s old life had taught him never to make himself: the police, the real ones, the ones outside Draven’s payroll, the ones a dock boss’s estranged cousin on the city council had quietly kept clean for exactly this kind of day.