Stepmother Beats Poor Waitress For Feeding Stray Dog — The Mafia Boss Saw Her Scars & Takes Action

Chapter 6

He returned to the diner on the nights that followed.

And instead of sitting at the last table, he took a seat at the counter, where he could see the entire room reflected in the glass partition around the kitchen.

And by the third night, he’d begun to notice Table Number Seven.

Table Number Seven stood beside the window, two steps from the entrance, in a place where anyone sitting there could see the entire sidewalk out front and the stretch of street running west.

The person at that table was a young man in his early twenties, with short black hair and a canvas jacket worn thin at the elbows. He arrived after the night shift had been underway for a while, and he remained there until the shift ended.

He didn’t eat.

He ordered coffee—a single cup—then let it grow cold through the night, taking an occasional sip merely for the sake of it.

He didn’t bring his phone to the table. He didn’t read anything. He simply sat there.

And whenever the diner door opened, his eyes lifted before the bell even rang—then lowered again when he saw that the person coming in was only a truck driver or some drunken stranger who’d wandered into the wrong place.

On the fourth night, Cassian counted.

The young man looked up eleven times.

He wasn’t watching the door. He was watching her.

By the fifth night, Cassian sent a message to Wilder Ashgrove and told him to have someone investigate the face—adding that if they uncovered any connection to the Merrick family, they weren’t to touch him inside the diner.

Wilder replied that he’d have an answer before morning.

The answer came sooner than that.

Wilder called back while it was still dark, and there was something in his voice that belonged to a man who didn’t know where to begin.

He said the young man’s name was Tobias Sandoval. That he was twenty-three years old, lived with his grandmother and younger sister in Pilsen, had no criminal record, no debts, and no ties to anyone on the city’s northwest side.

Then Wilder told him the one thing that left Cassian silent on the other end of the line for a long while.

Tobias Sandoval was a prep cook at that very diner. His shift ended just as the night shift began.

Cassian ended the call and sat gazing through the kitchen partition at the back of a young man sitting before a cup of stone-cold coffee at Table Number Seven—dressed in his ordinary clothes after removing his apron and finishing the work he’d been paid to do hours earlier.

He waited until she carried a tray into the kitchen. Then he rose, walked over to Table Number Seven, and sat down in the chair across from Tobias.

Tobias knew who he was. It showed on his face immediately.

And with it came something else Cassian hadn’t expected.

Because the first thing to appear in the young man’s expression wasn’t fear.

Tobias glanced quickly toward the kitchen door before looking at Cassian. He checked to make sure she was out of sight before he thought about protecting himself.

Cassian asked what he was doing there.

Tobias wrapped both hands around the cold cup and stared down at it.

He said she walked home. He said the journey from the diner to where she lived covered four blocks, and the streetlights along the middle two had been broken since summer—and people had reported them to the city three times, but no one had come to repair them.

He said she wouldn’t let anyone take her home. That he’d asked her once, and she’d thanked him and refused in a way that made it clear asking again would only make her uncomfortable.

So he’d stopped asking.

He said he stayed behind instead. He waited for her to close the diner, then followed her from a block away on the opposite side of the street—until she turned into the final alley and he saw the light above the back door come on.

Only then did he go home.

Cassian asked how long he’d been doing it.

Tobias counted backward through two winters and one summer, then said it had been about two years.

Cassian asked whether she knew.

Tobias shook his head. He said she walked on one side of the street while he walked on the other, and she’d never once looked back.

There wasn’t a trace of hurt in his voice when he said it. He sounded as though he were reporting a technical detail from a job that had long since become familiar.

Then he lifted his head, and for the first time in their entire conversation, he looked directly into Cassian Ror’s face.

“I know what’s happening to her,” he said. “I don’t know everything, but I know enough that I can’t sleep.”

He paused and slowly turned the cup in a circle on the tabletop.

“I can’t save her,” he said. “All I can do is sit here.”

Cassian said nothing for a very long time.

Then he rose, and before leaving, he did something no one else in the diner saw except that young man.

He reached out and rested a hand on Tobias’s shoulder—once, very briefly—then drew it away.

He returned to his seat at the counter.

When she came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of clean towels, everything in the room looked exactly as it had before. And she had no idea that a conversation about her had just taken place at the table beside the window.

Just as she’d never known that, throughout the past two years, every night she walked through those two dark blocks, someone on the other side of the street had always matched his footsteps to hers.