A Single Mom’s Dog Dug Up a Buried Mafia Boss — Then He Revealed Why She Was Chosen
## CHAPTER 2
By eight the next morning, the storm had passed and left the forest wrapped in fog. Natalie hadn’t slept — she’d spent the night swapping IV bags and stoking the fire, her father’s loaded .357 sitting on the counter within reach. When she’d let Goliath in at six, the mastiff had padded straight to the stranger, sniffed him once, and settled his enormous head across the man’s shins with a sigh, as if he’d already decided something Natalie hadn’t.
Now the man’s eyes opened sharp and lucid, no confusion in them at all. He took in the IV, the bandage, the dog, the gun, and the corner of his bruised mouth twitched. “You know how to use that, Florence Nightingale?”
“No safety. Hair trigger,” she said, keeping her distance. “Who are you?”
He pushed up on his elbows, wincing. “Mateo Romano.” The name meant nothing to her — she read patient charts, not headlines. “Should it?” she asked. “No,” he said. “Better that way. Call it logistics. My vice president decided it was time for a hostile takeover.”
“The people who buried you.”
“Vincenzo.” His eyes went cold. “My younger brother. And Petro, my second. They ambushed me at a meeting, shot my driver, drove me out here to suffocate in the dirt. They wanted me to suffer.” He looked at her steadily. “You interrupted their funeral arrangements.”
A cold sweat broke along her neck. “You need to leave the second you can walk. I have a son.”
“I know.” His gaze flicked to the toy trucks lined up in the corner, and something in his hardness softened by a fraction. “And I owe you my life. A life debt is absolute where I come from. No harm comes to you or the boy.”
“The best way to manage that is to leave.”
“If I walk out that door now, I bleed out in a mile, or Vincenzo’s sweepers find me,” he said, flat and practical. “When they realize the grave’s empty, they’ll canvas the whole mountain. Every cabin.”
As if summoned, Goliath’s head snapped up, ears forward, the growl building again. Natalie froze. Through the window, unmistakable: tires crunching over her long gravel driveway.
Mateo’s exhaustion vanished in an instant, replaced by something cold and calculating. He forced himself upright against the counter, face gray with pain. “Hide the IV. Clothes under the rug. Now.” He pressed himself into the blind spot behind the kitchen wall and lifted a cast-iron skillet from the stove. “Go to the door. Hold the dog. You’re an annoyed, exhausted mother who heard nothing.”
A heavy knock rattled the front door, and Natalie’s hands were shaking before she’d even reached for the handle.
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