He Ordered His Vicious Pit Bull to Attack a Young Waitress — Then the Mafia Boss Witnessed Something No One Expected
CHAPTER 7
That night, after the last table had cleared and the pianist had gone home, Sebastian found her on the restaurant’s back steps, Cerberus stretched across her feet, the city humming somewhere beyond the alley wall.
He sat beside her without asking, close enough that his shoulder pressed against hers.
“You could still leave,” he said quietly. “I’d let you go. Make sure you were protected, set up somewhere safe. Away from all of this.”
She turned to look at him — really look, the way she had that first night when a scarred dog had decided she was worth defending.
“I chose this,” she said. “I choose you. Not because I’m trapped, and not because I’m afraid anymore.” She pressed a finger lightly to his lips before he could argue. “I found something here I never expected to find anywhere. Purpose. Partnership. Proof that even people like us can build something worth protecting.”
Sebastian’s forehead dropped to hers, a gesture that would have been unthinkable to the man who’d once lifted her chin with two fingers and called her a mystery to be solved. Cerberus’s tail thumped once against the concrete, content, unhurried — the sound of something that had finally stopped waiting for the next attack.
Across the city, the old guard was already becoming a rumor other men told to frighten themselves. The Serpent’s Den would never be innocent — it had been built on too much blood for that, and it would go on serving men who dealt in fear for a living. But under the two of them, it had become something rarer than clean.
Honest about what it was, while reaching for what it might still become.
Nenah rested her hand on Cerberus’s scarred head, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing, the same place her palm had landed the very first night, bracing for teeth that never came.
He leaned into her touch, the way he always did now.
Not because he had to.
Because he chose to.
THE END
