The Plus-Size Poor Widow Entered The Mafia Boss’s Secret Dog Auction—Then Every Eye Turned To Her

Chapter 2

The room they gave her was a storage closet partitioned off the corner of the warehouse — a folding table, two chairs, a bare bulb pouring down a flat, dead light that made everything look like an interrogation room. Nero came in of his own accord and lay down at her feet, as if that were the only place in the world he still wanted to be. Gus positioned himself outside the door. The old man didn’t come in.

Ricardo let her wait twenty minutes. Long enough for her to understand that making people wait was also a kind of language, a way of saying I am the one who decides when things begin.

When he entered, he placed a thick envelope on the table and pushed it toward her with two fingers.

“There’s fifty thousand dollars in there,” he said. “More than you’d make in a year and a half of scrubbing my floors. In exchange: you never walked into this building, you never saw the dog, you never saw me. Tomorrow morning you turn in your resignation, move out of state if you’re smart, and forget tonight the way you’d forget a bad dream.”

Charlotte looked at the envelope for a long time. Long enough that he thought she was calculating. She was — just not what he assumed.

She didn’t push it back with the offended grandeur of a woman in a movie. She didn’t lift her chin or raise her voice. She only placed one hand on Nero’s head, where the skin had grown calloused from a muzzle strapped too tightly for too many years, and said softly: “I won’t take your money. And it isn’t pride.”

“Then what is it?”