The Mafia Boss’s Fiancée Kicked a Poor Waitress for Saving a Dying Dog — She Had No Idea Whose Dog It Really Was

Chapter 2

She was too late, and then she wasn’t.

The yard was a circus of flashlights and phone screens when she hit the gate, and the crowd parted for her the way water parts for a bullet, and the father was still holding the knife, and the boy was still holding the phone, and the dog was on the ground, and the dog was still.

“Your dog is dead,” the father said, grinning. “Should have kept that dog on a leash.”

Her voice didn’t shake. It didn’t rise. It was the quietest thing on the street, and every phone in eleven thousand homes went silent to hear it.

“Go to hell.”

She moved. The crowd scattered. The father scrambled backward, laughing, knife held out like a charm against her. “Oh, she’s actually going to kill us! Are you crazy? Look at my mom!” And the mother, the housecoat, the sour face, was running now, screaming, *”Leave my family alone or I’ll—”* and Kayla turned, and the mother stopped, and the whole street held its breath, and then a low, wet, animal sound came from her throat — the sound they had all been waiting for without knowing it.

“Stop it!” the mother screamed. “Stop it! Your dog is alive! You expect me to believe you monsters? Go to hell! Go to hell!”

The mother dropped the cage door. Milo moved.

He was alive. Beaten, bleeding from a shallow cut, trembling — but alive. The knife had only grazed him. The death, the silence, the eleven thousand viewers: a performance. For the views.

“See?” the father said, recovering fast, laughing into the camera. “I was lying. This dog is fine. We just did the live stream for show. We just wanted the views. We didn’t do anything to your dog.”

Kayla stood in the wreckage of the yard, and the live stream watched her, and something in her chest came slowly, horribly, back to stillness.

“Okay,” she said, to no one and to everyone. “I’ll listen to you. I’ll calm down.”

She knelt. Milo licked her hand. The tag on his collar — RICHARD — caught the light, and the boy smirked at the camera, and the mother’s phone was already pointed at the most interesting thing it had ever seen.

“I’ll let you live for today,” Kayla said, rising. “But if you even think about hurting my Milo again—”

They were still laughing when she walked away. But the mother had stopped laughing. The mother was looking at her phone, at the photo she’d taken the night before, at the men she’d seen leaving Kayla’s house at two in the morning, and she was zooming in.

The men in the photo weren’t entering her house.

They were leaving it. And the man in the front — the bald one, the scarred one — was not standing.

He was on one knee.