The mob boss bought a weak dog for $1 — not knowing it would change his life forever.

Chapter 6

The next morning, I mobilized everything. Every security camera around the docks within a three-mile radius. Every underground contact line. Every pair of eyes. Every ear on the ground. Every small-time criminal who owed me a favor.

A fifty-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who brought him back alive.

And a warning spread through Chicago’s underworld even faster than the reward money: anyone who touched Draven’s dog—by accident or intention—would die in a way they wouldn’t want to imagine.

But no one found him. No trace on the cameras. No leads from the lines. No one had seen a 130-pound Neapolitan Mastiff wandering the streets of Chicago.

It was like he’d evaporated into the night along with the smoke at the docks.

During the first week, I kept searching. In the second week, I was still searching, but quieter. By the third week, I stopped asking for updates—but no one dared stop looking.

The first month passed. Then the second.

The penthouse returned to its old silence—but now it wasn’t the kind of expensive, comfortable silence. It was the silence of a room with something missing. The kind of silence you feel on your skin.

I changed—not the way everyone expected. I didn’t fall apart. Didn’t drink. Didn’t yell at anyone. I became worse in a much more dangerous way.

I went back to the old version of myself—the version from before the dog—but darker. My decisions came faster, without pause, without the split-second wait. The split second I’d learned unconsciously from him.

I gave orders and turned away. Cut people off and kept walking. No one dared say anything—except Jonas.

One night, he was in the car with Reed after I’d finished an interrogation more brutal than necessary.

Reed said quietly, “He’s angry.”

Jonas shook his head, looking out the window at the darkness of Chicago.

“No. He’s in pain. He just doesn’t know which word to use for it.”

At the end of the second month, rain fell over Chicago—like the sky was trying to wash away something it couldn’t name.

Water streamed down the floor-to-ceiling glass of the penthouse, turning the city lights into distorted streaks of blurred color, like the world itself was dissolving.

I sat on the couch in the dark living room. A glass of whiskey rested on the table beside me, poured so long ago I didn’t remember when. Untouched.

The only light in the room came from the phone turned facedown on the table, lighting up occasionally with messages I didn’t read.

The penthouse was silent. The kind of silence I’d known before him. The kind of silence I thought I’d never have to get used to again.

The corner of the room where he used to lie was empty. The blanket I’d left there was still in place, neatly folded. No one—not even the cleaning staff—had moved it, because they knew it wasn’t allowed.

Sixty-three nights.

I didn’t count them, but my body did. Sixty-three times my eyes drifted to the empty corner before sleeping. Sixty-three times I walked into the penthouse and didn’t hear nails clicking on the stone floor.

Then I heard it.

At first I thought it was the rain—water hitting the glass with the rhythm of the wind. But it wasn’t. The sound came from the front door.

Slow, faint, steady scratching. Nails on oak wood.

I stood—not quickly. I crossed the room with the slow steps of a man afraid that if he moved too fast, whatever was on the other side of the door would disappear before he got there.

I opened the door.

He was there.

Soaked. Thinner than I remembered, because he’d lost weight again. His coat was matted with mud and rainwater. A fresh scar ran from his left shoulder halfway down his front leg, pink skin showing through torn fur. He stood on four trembling legs, head slightly low, but eyes raised—looking directly at me.

Still those same eyes. Deep, dark brown. Focused. Not begging. Not explaining. Just looking. Like he was saying, I’m home.

Without saying anything.

He crossed the threshold—slow, heavy—leaving muddy pawprints on the marble floor I’d paid tens of thousands of dollars to install.

I didn’t look at the floor.

I watched him move through the room, past the couch, to the familiar corner—the same place as before—and lie down on the neatly folded blanket. He rested his head on his front paws, closed his eyes like he’d never left, like the last sixty-three nights had never happened.

I stood in the middle of the room, the front door still open behind me, rain blowing into the hallway outside. I stood there for a long time, looking at the dog lying in the corner of the room, breathing slowly, mud still dripping lightly from his coat onto the blanket.

Then I closed the door, walked over, and sat on the floor beside him.

Not on the couch. On the floor.

I placed my hand on his head. He didn’t open his eyes, but pressed his head more firmly into my palm. That small reflex saying he knew. He knew this hand. He remembered.

And for the first time in twenty-six years, my eyes became wet.

I didn’t cry. My body had forgotten how to cry a long time ago.

But something behind my eyes—something that had been frozen since the morning my mother was dragged away—started to thaw. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a thin layer of ice cracking. Water seeping through.

I stayed there, hand on his head, eyes wet, rain hitting the glass, Chicago glowing in blurs outside.

Then I felt something strange. My hand touched something hard around his neck, tangled in the knots of muddy fur. I brushed the fur aside and traced with my fingers a silver chain—old, tarnished, made of small links, caught in the fur on his neck, like someone had placed it on him or it had gotten tangled there while he wandered through some unknown place during those two lost months.

Hanging from the chain was a locket shaped like a heart—small, silver, its surface scratched and worn by time.

I opened it.

Inside was a small yellowed photograph, cracked in one corner. A young woman holding a boy. The woman had black hair, bright eyes, and a smile—the kind of smile I hadn’t seen anywhere in twenty-six years, but recognized instantly because it lived inside every dream I’d never admit I still had.

Margaret.

And the boy in her arms, wide-eyed, clutching his mother’s collar—was me.

I turned the locket over. There was an engraving on the back—small, faded, but readable in the city light coming through the glass.

Ridmont 4714. The truth didn’t die with me.

My hand closed around the locket so hard my knuckles turned white.

Ridmont. The psychiatric institution where my mother had been locked away. The place where she’d died.

And someone, somehow, had left this message behind.

And my dog, somehow, had brought it home.