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 8

They didn’t get the luxury of more time to sit with it.

The building’s fire alarm went off at seven that morning — not smoke, Mia would learn later, but a signal, Draven’s crude and effective way of clearing a hallway of witnesses before his men moved. By the time Mia and Kane were in the stairwell with the rest of the half-dressed, coughing tenants, Kane’s hand found the small of her back and pushed her, hard, toward the fire door instead of the lobby exit everyone else was funneling toward.

“Lobby’s a chokepoint,” he said, voice gone flat and fast, all traces of the shaking man from the bathroom floor burned away by something older and colder. “If Draven’s men are in this building, that’s where they’ll be standing.”

They were. Mia caught the shape of it through the fire door’s narrow window before Kane pulled her back — three men in maintenance jackets that didn’t fit, positioned exactly where a funnel of panicked tenants would push past them one at a time.

“They know,” Mia whispered.

“They suspect.” Kane’s jaw worked. “Doyle saw the transformation start last night — the growl, the name, he wasn’t imagining it, he’s seen it before on other men Draven’s hunted. He’ll have reported it by now. Draven doesn’t leave loose ends to confirm themselves twice.”

The fire escape dropped them into the alley behind the laundromat — the same alley, Mia realized with a lurch, where she’d found him bleeding three weeks ago, the geography folding back on itself like the story insisting on its own symmetry. Kane went first down the rusted ladder, wincing at a body that still hadn’t fully forgiven him for eight months of dog-shaped survival, and caught her at the bottom when her foot slipped on wet rust.

“Where do we go?” she asked, and heard, for the first time, *we* leave her own mouth without hesitation.

“Somewhere Draven’s never looked, because he never thought I’d be stupid enough to go there.” Kane’s eyes, so much more human now, so much more tired, found hers. “The old dock office. My father’s. It’s condemned. Nobody’s set foot in it since the ambush that started all of this.” A breath. “Feels right that it might be where it ends, too.”