She Was Only a Dog Trainer Trying to Heal a Traumatized Shepherd — Then the Mafia Boss Who Owned Him Made Her the Key to Surviving a Deadly Betrayal

Chapter 9

Luna had been deteriorating all day. Pacing. Whining. Refusing food. By eight o’clock she was full-on spiraling — destructive anxiety, the kind that came from deep trauma triggers I hadn’t been able to identify yet. Roman had tried everything. His presence usually calmed her. Not tonight. Sophie had tried. The building’s night security had tried. Nothing worked.

The sound of it reached me before Roman did — Luna keening in a way I’d never heard, a low, rhythmic howl that wasn’t a cry for attention but a grief-stricken echo of something old. I’d logged dozens of trauma cases. I’d seen dogs spiral over thunderstorms, over loud noises, over the specific smell of a man who’d hurt them. This was different. This was a dog who’d been pulled back into a nightmare she couldn’t name, tearing at the world to get out of it.

“She needs you.” Roman appeared in the doorway of the guest room where I’d been reviewing the day’s surveillance logs. His hair was disheveled from running his hands through it, his shirt untucked. I’d never seen him anything less than perfectly controlled. “She won’t settle unless you’re there.”

I could hear Luna’s distress even from here. The kind of crying that came from a place beyond reason, beyond training.

“Where is she?”

“My room.”

Of course she was.

I followed Roman down the hall to the master suite. Luna was on the floor beside his bed, shaking, her breathing rapid and shallow, her nails leaving raw tracks in the rug where she’d been digging. The second she saw me, she crawled over and pressed her entire body against my legs. I sat down. She climbed into my lap — all seventy pounds of traumatized German Shepherd — and buried her face against my chest.

“Hey,” I murmured, running my hands over her in the pattern she’d learned meant safety. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

Slowly, painfully, her breathing started to even out.

Roman watched from the doorway. “What triggered it?”

“I don’t know yet. Could be anything. A sound. A smell. A specific time of day that reminds her of whatever happened before.” I kept my voice low and steady. “How long has she been like this?”

“Since six. It’s getting worse.”

Luna whimpered and pressed closer.

I looked up at Roman, and I knew what I was about to say would change things. Would cross a line from professional arrangement into something more complicated.

“I need to stay with her tonight. Here. She won’t calm down if I leave.”

Roman’s expression was unreadable. “That means you stay in my room. I know you understand what Klov will assume if his surveillance sees you didn’t return to the guest room.”

I did understand. And some part of me — the part that was tired of being afraid, tired of being invisible, tired of being someone who didn’t get to make bold choices — didn’t care.

“Let him assume,” I said. “Luna needs me. That’s what matters.”

Roman looked at me for a long moment, and I saw the exact second he made his decision.

“Stay,” he said. “I’ll take the couch in my office.”

“You take the bed, Roman. Not negotiable. You’re here for the dog, not for me.”

But the way he said it — the slight roughness in his voice — suggested he was reminding himself as much as me. “There are spare clothes in the dresser. Bathroom’s through that door. If you need anything —”

“I’ll be fine.”

He hesitated — a fraction of a second longer than a man like him ever hesitated — and for that one heartbeat, the armor cracked. I saw the exhaustion under his eyes, the way his shoulders carried something heavier than the city below us. Luna whined, and he looked at her, and something in the room softened. “There’s water by the bed. And if she wakes again —”

“I’ll stay with her. That’s the point.”

“Right.” He said it like he’d forgotten how to let anyone else carry it. “Right.”

He nodded and turned to leave.

“Roman,” I said.

He stopped.

“Thank you for trusting me with her.”

He didn’t turn around. “I trust you with more than the dog, Odessa.” Quiet. Almost like he hadn’t meant to say it at all. “That’s becoming a problem.”

Then he was gone, and I was alone in his bedroom with his traumatized dog and the scent of cedar and smoke embedded in every surface.

I should have been focused on Luna. On calming her. On figuring out what triggered this episode.

Instead, I sat there in the dark, feeling the ghost of Roman’s words settle somewhere behind my ribs, and wondered what it would cost me to become essential to a man like him.

Wondered if I was brave enough to find out.