She Pulled Three Puppies and a Drowning Stranger From an Icy River — Then Learned She Had Rescued the Mafia Boss
CHAPTER 4
Marlo returned at dusk with Lazar’s watch, cracked open, a tiny blinking chip hidden among its gears. “A tracking device,” Lazar said, voice dropping into something dangerous. “Casius planted it. That’s how he found the lakeside road.” Worse, Marlo explained — the signal was weak, water-damaged, giving only a wide radius around the lake, not a precise location. But it was moving now, off the lake and onto shore.
“A corpse doesn’t walk by itself,” Marlo said. “Once Casius sees that signal move, he’ll know you’re alive. And that the evidence is still within reach.”
They had one night, maybe, before Casius sent men to search the scattered cabins section by section.
Dileia’s first instinct — destroy the chip — Lazar refused. “If it goes dark suddenly, he’ll know someone found it. Let him think he’s hunting a wounded, isolated man.” His eyes went cold. “When he comes, he won’t expect that prey to be ready.”
There was only one thing absolute to Dileia now: Pippa had to be gone before dark. She pulled Marlo aside. “Five miles west, there’s a woman named Esther. Take my daughter there right now, and swear you’ll put her directly into that woman’s hands.”
“I’ll get her somewhere safe,” Marlo said. “I’ll come back before dark. You have my word.”
“He’s the only man in this world I trust completely,” Lazar told her.
Dileia knelt before her daughter, forcing a smile over a breaking heart. “Tonight you’re visiting Miss Esther for a little while.” Pippa’s small face read the wrongness in the air the way children always could. “Are you coming with me, Mommy?”
“Mommy has to stay and help him get better. I’ll come get you soon. I promise.” She held her daughter, breathing in her hair, memorizing it. “If I go, who’s going to play with them?” Pippa asked, looking at the puppies, and a puppy leapt up to lick her cheek, pulling a laugh through her tears — the most beautiful and most heartbreaking sound Dileia had ever heard.
She watched the car disappear down the snow-covered road until there was nothing left to watch, and something in her locked into place. Her daughter was safe. There was nothing left to hold back.
“Let’s get ready to welcome our guests,” she told Lazar.
She knew this land better than any hunter ever could. She sketched the terrain by oil lamp — the only approach from the east, thin ice where the creek ran under snow directly before the house. She laid her father’s old animal traps along the path, set lamps as decoys to draw eyes toward empty corners, and when Lazar tried to help fasten the door bolts, the pain in his side buckled him instantly.
“You’re not the hero tonight,” she told him, hardening into the voice of a nurse giving orders. “You’re a badly wounded man. Save your strength until it’s truly needed.”
He sat, accepting for the first time that the one in command tonight wasn’t him.
When she handed him the cleaned gun, he took it like an oath. The puppies lay low near the door, ears sharp, her living alarm system. Outside, wind rose again, the power died, and the house sank into firelight and shadow.
“Whatever happens,” Lazar said quietly in the dark, “I won’t let them touch you. Let me repay the debt.”
