The Mafia King Buried His Loyal Dog as a Hero — Then a Young Vet Discovered It Was Never Really Dead
CHAPTER 4
Forty kilometers north, in a glass-walled conference room atop Gallagher Holdings, Reed had just finished dismantling a business partner’s confidence with nothing more than ten seconds of silence. Warren, the man foolish enough to threaten walking away from the deal, sat back down without another word. The meeting ended on Reed’s terms, as it always did.
He was alone at his desk afterward, the leather collar lying untouched where it had sat for three months, when Boon walked in without waiting to be called and set a phone down on the desk, screen already lit.
Three photographs. A thin Neapolitan mastiff on a stranger’s porch. A long scar down the left shoulder. Reed enlarged the second image — the wrinkled face, the heavy brown eyes, the broad muzzle he’d looked at every day for three years.
He said nothing. He touched the collar beside the phone, just once, then stood.
“How many men should I bring?” Boon asked.
“None.” Reed was already moving.
Boon drove him forty minutes south in silence, two cars trailing at a distance, and stopped in front of a small house at the edge of the woods. Reed walked the narrow path alone.
Noel opened the door to a man who plainly didn’t belong on this road — dark suit, unreadable eyes, the stillness of someone used to being watched and giving nothing back. Before she could ask what he wanted, claws clicked against the wood floor behind her.
Rook came to the threshold, stopped, and drew in the air once, twice. Her whole body changed. Ears up. Tail rigid, then wagging so hard her hindquarters shook with it. She dropped into the full posture of submission Reed had seen her perform a hundred times — front legs stretched flat, muzzle nearly to the ground — but this time it came with a long, drawn-out whimper that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with memory.
Reed sat down on the porch floor without a word, slow and careful, like sudden movement might make the whole scene disappear. His hand found her head. She pressed her nose into his palm, wet and cold and exactly as she always had, unchanged after three months of surviving alone in the woods.
A scraping sound came from inside the house — the puppy, tripping and rolling and crawling determinedly toward him, climbing straight into his lap. Reed looked down at the child he’d believed lost with Rook in the rain beneath that cliff, and found he couldn’t speak at all.
Noel watched from the doorway, saying nothing. She didn’t need him to explain who he was. Rook’s whole body against his chest said it plainly enough.
When Reed finally stood and called Rook to follow him to the car, the mastiff took three steps down the path — and stopped. She looked back at Noel. She looked into the house, where the puppy lay on an old cushion. She looked at Reed.
Then she lay down in the middle of the dirt path and didn’t move.
For the first time in her life, Rook didn’t obey him.
