Mafia Boss Promised to Marry Whoever Saved His Dog…He Never Expected It to Be a Black Student

Chapter 3

The alley to her left was narrow and dark — the kind of space a city uses to hide its ugliness. Dumpsters. Cracked concrete. A single orange light mounted too high to illuminate anything useful. She stood at the entrance and told herself to keep walking. It was almost three in the morning. She had a seven a.m. shift at the campus dining hall, then a two-hour lecture. She couldn’t afford to sleep through it. Whatever was in that alley was not her problem. She was a young woman alone, and the responsible thing, the sensible thing, was to—

The whimper came again.

She went in.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust. Then she saw the shape near the far wall — low to the ground, partially tucked beneath a collapsed section of cardboard. A dog. Medium-sized. Light fur gone dark and matted in patches. One leg extended at a wrong angle.

It lifted its head when she crouched down and made a sound that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a cry — the sound of an animal that has learned not to trust anything that moves toward it, but is too exhausted to enforce that lesson anymore.

“Hey,” June said softly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She reached out slowly, palm up, the way she had learned at the vet clinic. The dog’s nostrils flared. Its head dropped back to the ground.

She got closer, and her breath caught.

There was blood. Real blood — not a scrape, not a surface wound — soaking the fur along the animal’s left flank and seeping steadily into the wet ground beneath it. Something had torn through the skin cleanly. Too cleanly for a fall or a fight. June had spent enough hours in the back room of Dr. Reyes’s unlicensed clinic on the edge of Flushing to know the difference between a wound made by something sharp and deliberate and one made by accident.

This dog had not been in a fight.

This dog had been cut.

Her hands were already moving. She shrugged off her backpack, unzipped the front pocket, found the small square of gauze she always kept there — a habit from the clinic. Stuff a few squares in your bag. You never know. — and pressed it flat against the worst of the bleeding.

The dog flinched hard. She held steady, keeping gentle, even pressure, murmuring the whole time in a low, continuous voice. Not words, exactly. Just sound. Just the assurance of another living thing saying, I am here. I am here. I am here.

The gauze soaked through in under a minute.

She looked at her jacket sleeve. Then she pulled the sleeve over her hand, gripped the seam, and tore. The sound of the fabric splitting was very loud in the narrow alley. She folded the strip twice, pressed it against the wound — firmer this time — and used her other hand to tear a second strip from the hem for binding. Her fingers shook from cold — she told herself it was just the cold — and it took three tries to get the knot tight enough.

The dog watched her the entire time. Its eyes were dark and steady and very, very tired.

“You’re okay,” she whispered. “You hear me? You’re going to be okay.”

She didn’t know if that was true. She said it anyway.

Getting it into her arms was harder than she expected. The dog was heavier than its frame suggested — all dense muscle — and every shift of position made it whine in a way that made her chest hurt. She worked her arms under it carefully, redistributed its weight so the injured leg hung free, and straightened up with her back protesting the effort.

The dog went still against her chest. Its breathing was shallow and fast.

She started walking.

Dr. Reyes’s clinic was twenty minutes away on a good night. Tonight — carrying a bleeding dog in the rain with a split shoe — it took her thirty-four. She counted her steps for a while to keep from thinking about how tired her arms were. Then she stopped counting and just walked. Head down against the rain, the dog’s warm weight against her sternum the only thing that felt real.

The clinic occupied the ground floor of a building that, officially, on paper, did not operate as a medical facility. No license posted in the window, because there was no license to post. What it had was a side door that was never fully locked, a supply room that stayed stocked through methods June had learned not to ask about too directly, and an elderly veterinarian who had lost his official certification eight years ago over a dispute with a regulatory board he still called corrupt — with a specificity and passion that suggested he had thought about it every day since.

He turned no one away. He accepted payment in whatever form was offered — and often in no form at all.

June kicked the side door twice with her foot, since her arms were full. A light came on. Shuffling footsteps. The door opened.

Dr. Reyes looked at the dog. Then at June — the soaked jacket, the torn sleeves, the blood on her forearms and the front of her jeans. He stepped back without a word to let her through.

She laid the dog on the metal examination table under the fluorescent light. And finally, with the animal no longer in her arms, she felt how badly she was shaking. She gripped the edge of the table with both hands and breathed.

“Laceration, left flank,” she said, her voice coming out steadier than she felt. “Significant blood loss. Maybe forty minutes minimum before I found it. The binding held. I don’t know how deep.”

Dr. Reyes was already beside her, pulling on gloves, bending low over the wound with a flashlight. He made a short sound through his nose. “You did well with the pressure. Go sit down.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re swaying. Go sit down.”

She sat on the metal stool in the corner and watched him work. His hands were old and spotted but absolutely steady — moving with the economical precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times and had long ago stopped being impressed by emergencies. He cleaned the wound. Assessed the depth. Sutured with small, neat stitches.

The dog bore it with a patience that struck June as almost eerie — as if it had made a decision to trust the room and was committed to that decision.

At some point during the procedure, she started crying.

She didn’t notice at first. Her face was already wet from the rain, and the tears came quietly — without drama, just a slow overflow she only registered when her vision blurred. She pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes and made no sound. She was so tired. So deeply, specifically tired. Not the tired that sleep fixes, but the tired that lives in the bones — the kind that accumulates over months of not enough money and not enough rest and too many moments of looking at the gap between where you are and where you thought you’d be by now, and not knowing how to cross it.

She had come to New York for her degree with every intention of making something solid out of her life. Instead she was sitting in an unlicensed animal clinic at three-thirty in the morning, with someone else’s blood on her jeans and a biochemistry textbook she couldn’t afford, and eleven minutes added to her walk every night because of a debt she was losing the ability to pretend was temporary.

The dog turned its head on the table and looked at her. Just looked at her, with those dark, steady eyes.

She lowered her hand.

“Hey,” she said softly.

The dog held her gaze.

“You made it,” she told it.