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 5

He came back at dawn — not the dog. A man, kneeling naked and shaking on her bathroom floor in the grey early light, one hand braced against the tub, black hair plastered to his forehead, and eyes so exactly the color of the dog’s that Mia’s scream died in her throat before it fully formed, replaced by something closer to recognition than shock.

“Don’t,” he said, before she could speak, before she could run, before she could do anything but stand frozen in the doorway with her father’s medallion still clutched in one fist. His voice was wrecked, low, unused, like something dragged up from underwater. “Please. Just — give me a minute. It doesn’t last.”

“You’re —” She couldn’t finish it. There wasn’t a word that fit.

“Kane.” He said it like a confession, like it cost him something to hand over even that much. “Kane Voss.”

The name meant nothing to her, and everything to the tremor that ran through his shoulders as he said it, like a man setting down a weight he’d been carrying so long he’d forgotten what his spine felt like without it.

“Eight months ago,” he said, not looking at her, staring instead at his own hands like he still didn’t trust them to stay hands, “I ran the north docks. The freight lines. Half the city’s shipping moved because I said it could.” A breath, ragged. “My own second-in-command decided that wasn’t enough anymore.”

“Viktor,” Mia said, and didn’t know why the name surfaced in her mouth until Kane’s head snapped up, sharp, startled.

“How do you —”

“I don’t.” She held up the medallion, hand shaking. “I don’t know that name. I don’t know any of this. I know *this*.” She held out the little silver wolf, hers, her father’s, the one thing she had left of him. “It’s the same as yours.”

Kane looked at it the way a drowning man looks at the one hand reaching down through the water — and then he did something that frightened her more than the transformation had. He started to cry.

“Thomas,” he said. “Your father. Thomas Calloway.”