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 7
He told her the rest sitting fully dressed now, wrapped in her one good blanket, hands cupped around a mug of tea he wasn’t drinking, because talking with his hands empty made the shaking worse.
Viktor Draven had been Kane’s closest friend since they were seventeen. Had stood beside him at his father’s funeral. Had run the western routes with a loyalty Kane would have staked his own life on — had, in fact, staked his life on it, more than once, and never once thought twice.
The betrayal hadn’t come with guns. It had come with a drink, shared at a table Kane had sat at a hundred times before, a toast to a shipment closing clean, and a taste at the back of it that Kane had dismissed as bad whiskey until his hands started shrinking and his vision tunneled and the last thing he remembered as a man, for eight months, was Viktor’s face — not gloating. Almost sad. Almost apologetic. Saying, *You were always better at this than me, Kane. That’s the problem.*
“Wraithroot,” Kane said. “Old poison. Older families used to use it to make examples of traitors — not kill them, curse them, drop them so far down the food chain that everyone in the underworld would see what happens to men who get too big for their own legend.” His mouth twisted. “Viktor didn’t want me dead. He wanted the docks. Dead men get mourned and replaced. A man who just *vanishes* — that’s a story people keep asking about. That’s a throne nobody feels safe sitting on.”
“How do you break it?”
Kane looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that weighs whether an answer will help or wound.
“The old stories say it breaks on an act of loyalty that asks for nothing back.” He almost laughed, and it broke halfway into something else. “I spent eight months as a dog in gutters, expecting nothing, trusting nothing, and then a girl who couldn’t afford her own rent knelt down in the rain and told a bleeding animal *I’m not going to hurt you, you’re my family now* — and meant it. Meant it with nothing to gain.” His voice cracked on the last word. “It’s been breaking ever since. Slowly. That’s why it only lasts a few minutes right now. It’s not finished.”
Mia sat with that for a long moment, the tea going cold in her own hands, the weight of eleven years and two matching medallions and one dying father’s silence settling over the small apartment like snow.
“So Doyle,” she said finally. “The alley. None of it was random.”
“No.” Kane’s eyes went hard, the docks-boss returning briefly to his face like a mask sliding back into place. “Viktor’s men have been sweeping every district for eight months looking for a black dog that didn’t act like one. Word travels slow in gutters, but it travels. Somebody saw something. Doyle’s not your landlord’s real name — he’s Draven muscle, and he’s been in this building for three weeks under a lease he paid for in cash, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For me to slip.” He looked at her, and for the first time since the bathroom floor, something other than fear moved across his face. “I didn’t expect to slip for someone who fed me the good half of a sandwich.”