The Mafia Boss Opened His Door to a Freezing Dog—What Happened Next Melted His Heart

Chapter 3

He trailed off. He didn’t need to finish.

Damon turned away from the doctor, his face expressionless, and walked to the end of the hallway where the lights were dimmer. He stood there for a long moment, his hands clenched inside his coat pockets, his jaw tight enough to crack teeth.

Then he pulled out his phone.

“Toby.” His voice was flat, calm, the kind of calm that had always made his men more afraid than shouting ever could. “I need everything on a man named Julian Vance. Every transaction. Every contract. Every property. I want to know where every dollar went, whose name every asset is under, and I want it before sunrise.”

The voice on the other end didn’t ask questions. The voice on the other end said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up.

Damon slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned to look down the hallway. Dela was still sitting in the plastic chair, her head bowed, her shoulders rising and falling in the shallow rhythm of exhausted sleep. Beside her, the stroller was still. The little girl was asleep again, one hand dangling over the side, her fingers brushing against the floor.

And Titan — the massive dog that had followed Damon through every dark year of his life — lay flat on the floor in front of his mother’s hospital room, his massive head resting on his front paws, his eyes fixed on the door. He hadn’t moved since they arrived. He was guarding her.

Damon looked at the dog, at the child, at the exhausted young woman who had done what he should have done. And something cold and sharp began to crystallize in his chest.

He had paid. He had paid a fortune. He had sent money home every single month for eight years, funneling it through Julian Vance, a man he had hired through a trusted intermediary to care for his mother. And every quarter, Vance had sent reports. Polite, professional summaries. She is well. She is comfortable. The house is in good order. Your mother sends her love.

He had believed them. He had read them between meetings, between deals, between the hundred other demands of running an empire, and he had believed them because it was easier to believe than to come home.

And now, his mother lay in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms, her mind so far gone that she couldn’t recognize her own son, her body so wasted that she weighed less than the dog who had refused to leave her side.

A low sound escaped Damon’s throat — not a word, not a cry, but something animal and raw. His arm swung before he could stop it, and the glass vase on the table beside him exploded against the wall, raining shards across the polished floor.

A nurse’s head appeared in a doorway, then vanished just as quickly.

Titan lifted his head from the hospital room threshold, ears pricked, but the dog didn’t bark. He understood. This anger wasn’t for anyone present.

Damon stood in the center of the shattered glass, his chest heaving, and forced himself to breathe. Slow. Deep. Controlled. He had spent his entire life learning to control his rage, to turn it into something cold and precise, because uncontrolled anger was a weakness he couldn’t afford in his world.

But this wasn’t his world. This was his mother.

He bent down, picked up a single shard of glass, and set it gently on the table. When he straightened, his gray eyes had returned to their familiar ice.

Julian Vance would pay. Not with a quick bullet in the dark — that would be too merciful. He would pay with everything he had taken, and then he would pay more.