THE MASSIVE BLACK DOG WAITED IN A CHICAGO ALLEY FOR A DEAD CRIME BOSS — A SINGLE MOTHER FED IT, NEVER KNOWING THE MAN WAS STILL ALIVE AND COMING HOME

Chapter 6

Marin turned into the alley with the warm container of food in her hand, her head lowered against the wind, and she had made it halfway down before she realized something was wrong.

The dog wasn’t in his usual place.

She stopped, her heart lurching. For a terrible moment, she thought he had died, that the cold had finally taken him while she was at work, that she would find his body frozen against the wall.

Then she saw the figure kneeling beside him.

A man. Tall. Dressed in a long black coat that was old but well-made, the kind of coat that had once been expensive. He was holding the dog — her dog, the animal she had spent two weeks earning the trust of — and the dog was pressing against him with an intimacy he had never shown her. His tail was wagging. His whole body was trembling with joy.

Marin’s blood turned to ice.

She had lived in dangerous neighborhoods her whole life. She knew what a man in a dark alley at midnight usually meant. Every instinct told her to turn around, to walk away, to pretend she hadn’t seen anything.

But the dog was there. And she couldn’t leave him.

Logan looked up the moment he heard her footsteps. His eyes met hers across the frozen alley, and Marin felt something cold run down her spine. Those eyes were dark and sharp, carrying the weight of a life she couldn’t imagine. They were the eyes of a man who had seen too much, done too much, survived too much.

The two of them faced each other in the silence, their breath smoking in the air, the dog standing between them like a bridge.

“Who are you?” Marin asked, her voice steadier than she felt. “And what are you doing with my dog?”

Logan’s eyes narrowed slightly. He rose slowly, one hand pressing against his side, and Marin noticed the way he favored his left leg, the way his face was too pale beneath the stubble. He was hurt. Badly hurt.

“Your dog?” His voice was low and rough, like he hadn’t used it in days. “This is my dog. I’ve had him for three years.”

“You’ve been gone for two weeks.” The words came out before Marin could stop them. “I’ve been feeding him every night. I’ve been sitting with him in the freezing cold, talking to him, keeping him alive. Where were you?”

Something flickered in Logan’s eyes. Surprise, maybe. Or something softer, something he was trying to hide.

“I was dead,” he said quietly. “Or close enough.”

Brutus, as if sensing the tension between them, left Logan’s side and walked over to Marin. He pressed his enormous head against her hand, the way he had learned to do over the past two weeks, then turned back to look at Logan. He stood between them, tail wagging slowly, as if he was trying to show them that they were both his people.

The gesture did what no words could have done. The suspicion in the air didn’t disappear, but it softened, just enough for Marin to take a breath.

She set the food container on the ground, stepped back, and said, “I don’t care who you are. But if this dog belongs to you, you need to take care of him. He’s been waiting for you longer than anyone deserves to be waited for.”

Then she turned and walked away, forcing herself not to look back, though she could feel the dark eyes of the strange man following her until she disappeared from the alley.

She didn’t know that she had just met the most dangerous man in Chicago. She didn’t know that the whole city believed he was dead. And she didn’t know that her life, already balanced on a knife’s edge, was about to be pulled into something far bigger than she could have imagined.