The Mafia Boss’s Last Wish Before His Execution: Meeting the Dog — What Happened Was Unbelievable

Chapter 4

That smell. That sharply sweet scent still hanging in the air, sliding into his chest like a cold hand closing around his heart.

He had smelled it somewhere before. A very long time ago.

In a moment his mind had tried to bury for seven years, because it was bound to the greatest pain of his life. And now it was rising from beneath the mud of memory, blurred but undeniable. That scent tangled with the image of a kitchen, tangled with the sickly yellow light of a hanging lamp, tangled with something he hadn’t yet managed to piece into shape.

And the ring. That crest carved into the gold face. He felt as if he had seen its imprint somewhere before — a faint mark pressed into flesh, some tiny detail that seven years ago he had passed over in the stunned haze of loss and never thought of again.

His legs seemed to lift away from the earth. His ears rang. The chaos of the prison yard receded into a distant hum, and everything inside his head swayed, then suddenly settled into a terrifying stillness.

The stillness of a man who had just seen one shard of truth flash in the darkness after all the years he hadn’t allowed himself to believe.

His lips moved, and from his dry throat came a sentence so small it almost vanished in the wind.

It can’t be him.

Seven years earlier, on a late autumn night, rain poured down over the coastal city as if the sky were trying to wash away something that could never be cleansed. Raphael Castellano drove home many hours later than he had promised Marisol. A meeting that had dragged on at the harbor had kept him there.

While he had sat among men from the underworld discussing things that no longer meant anything, she had been home alone.

He remembered turning off his phone during the meeting — an old habit meant to keep anyone from disturbing him. He remembered the vague sting of guilt when he turned it back on during the drive home and saw the screen light up with a missed call from her. Only one call. But he had told himself he would apologize once he got home, that he would buy her the flowers she loved the next morning, that he would make it up to her as he had always promised and always been late to do.

The seaside road lay empty beneath the curtain of rain, his headlights sweeping across shimmering puddles. When he turned onto the narrow lane that led to their house, the first thing that made his heart tighten was the front door standing ajar — a dark, narrow gap spilling the sickly yellow light of the kitchen lamp that should have been off by then.

He called her name from the threshold, his voice rising through the silent house and fading without an answer. That silence was so heavy he felt it before he understood what had happened.

He stepped into the kitchen.

There, beneath the hanging lamp casting down a cold circle of light, Raphael Castellano’s world shattered into pieces that could never be put back together.

In that moment, everything he had once been — the powerful boss who made the whole city lower its voice in fear, the man who had never knelt before anyone — all of it collapsed, and he was only a stripped, bare human being, sinking down beside the woman he loved, calling her name again and again in a broken voice he didn’t even recognize as his own.

He didn’t remember how long he knelt there, time frozen solid around him, with only the rain tapping on the roof and his own choked sobs echoing through the empty kitchen. And in the midst of that numb, blinding shock, one thing he would only become aware of much later was that Duke wasn’t in the house.

The dog that had always stayed close to Marisol, the dog that had never left her side for even half a step, had vanished.

The back window of the kitchen stood wide open, and the soaked curtain flapped in the rain-lashed wind, as if something had leapt through that frame and into the darkness.