A Giant Mastiff Protected a Homeless Girl in the Cold — The Mafia Boss Was Shocked

Chapter 10

On the ninth day since Cora Marlowe had come to the Lincoln Park house, the pounding started at the front door.

Not knocking — pounding, a fist against the oak in long, violent swings, followed by the hoarse shouting of a drunk man through the cold evening air. “Open the damn door!”

Upstairs, the file slipped from Cora’s hands and strewed across the floor. Her body reacted before her mind could; her heart slammed, her breath went short and shallow, and her hands were shaking so badly she could not have made a fist to save herself. She slid off the bed, pressed her back into the corner between the wardrobe and the wall, drew her knees up, and wrapped both arms over her head — the old position, the position her body had memorized through hundreds of nights in that apartment whenever heavy footsteps crossed the floor, the position her body still believed was the only safe one.

She was not in this warm house anymore. She was back in that rental with the stove and the crib, and Brody’s voice was coming through the walls like it had cut every phone line she had ever owned.

Orso reacted before she could. The dog was off the bed and in front of her in a heartbeat, planted between the corner and the door, ears up, the fur along his spine rising as a growl started deep in his chest like an engine turning over — a hundred and thirty pounds of muscle and bone prepared, without a moment’s thought, for whatever crossed that threshold.

Downstairs, Dominic had heard it too. He came out of the study with Luca behind him, crossed the hall, and stepped to where Silas was already holding the door with his body, thumb hooked on the edge of his jacket. Outside stood Brody Sloan — thinner than two years ago, hollow-cheeked, unshaven, breath thick with cheap whiskey but fists still clenched with the reflexive readiness of a man who has always settled everything with his hands.

“I know she’s in there,” Brody shouted, spittle flying. “That’s my woman, and that baby’s mine. I signed that birth certificate. You hear me? I got rights!”

Silas didn’t move. “You need to leave.”

Brody shoved forward one step, finger stabbing toward Silas’s face, voice ringing off the brick. “You can’t keep her from me! I’ll call the cops —”

The sentence died in his throat. Dominic Moretti stepped into the doorway, and the light fell away behind him, leaving only the broad outline of his shoulders and two very still, very cold eyes fixed on the man on the steps.

Brody knew who he was. Everyone on the south side did. He swallowed, his fists loosening a fraction, but the whiskey and the habit of aggression kept him rooted where any other man would have run.

“I just want what’s mine,” he said, lower now. “She’s my girl.”

Dominic looked at him — at the calloused fists, the bloodshot eyes, the cheap violence leaking out of the man’s stance — and he thought of the finger-shaped bruises he had seen on Cora’s wrist the first night in the car. He thought of the woman upstairs curled into a corner, shaking, because of the voice of the man standing on his steps. And something colder than a January night moved across Dominic Moretti’s face.

He stepped down one stair. Just one. Brody stepped back.

Dominic spoke, his voice low and clear as cut stone. “You lay a hand on her again, and they won’t find enough of you left to scrape off this sidewalk.”

He did not shout. He did not threaten loudly. He said it the way a man states the weather, with the total certainty of someone who has never had to say anything twice.

Brody looked into those eyes and saw something even the whiskey could not argue with: not anger. Certainty. The certainty of a man who means exactly what he has just said.

“This ain’t over,” Brody muttered, backing down the path, through the gate, and into the dark.

Dominic watched him go, then turned to Silas, his voice returning to its flat register. “Follow him. Round the clock. Where he sleeps, where he drinks, who he talks to — and pull his whole sheet. Every arrest, every charge, every violation, everything.”

Silas nodded once and vanished into the night.

Upstairs, Cora heard the chair creak in the hallway. She did not open the door. But her breathing slowed, little by little, because between her and the echo of Brody’s voice there was now a door, a dog, and a man the entire city was afraid of — and for the first time in two years, somebody else was standing watch.

She could not sleep that night. Every time she closed her eyes, the voice came back. At two in the morning she gave up, pulled on the sweater Agnes had left her, and went barefoot down the stairs. The fire in the living room burned low, orange light trembling across the walls. Dominic sat in the leather armchair facing it, not relaxed but at watch — back straight, shoulders forward, eyes open, the black weight of a pistol lying on the table at his elbow. No file. No glass. Just the fire, and the waiting.

“Do you ever sleep?” Cora asked from the foot of the stairs.

He didn’t look at her right away. Then he turned, the firelight softening the lines of his face, and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with hours — the weariness of a man carrying too much for too long, without ever letting himself set it down.

“Not when someone’s counting on me.”

Cora walked to the sofa, picked up the folded wool blanket from the arm, and carried it to his chair. She did not say a word as she draped it over his shoulders, the way she had once tucked a blanket around Nina on that last night, the way she had once split a half-loaf with a dying dog — the instinct to care for something, the one thing life had never managed to take from her.

Her hand brushed his shoulder once — a second, no more — and she drew back and went up the stairs.

Dominic didn’t move. He didn’t say thank you. But in the margin of shadow by the chair, away from the firelight, his fingers closed slowly into a fist, like a man trying to hold on to something that had just touched him, afraid it might slip away.

For the first time in five years, the warmth he felt did not come from the fire.