🐾 The Little Girl Who Calmed the Mafia Boss’s Guard Dog

Chapter 14 - The Last Dinner at the Greenhouse

Matteo looked terrible.

Blood stained the side of his shirt. Rain had plastered his hair to his forehead. His charm had been stripped away, leaving a man who looked younger, frightened, and angrier than he had any right to be.

Paul had a gun on him before he crossed the threshold.

Matteo raised both hands. “If I wanted you dead, I would have let Aldo’s men finish.”

Damen stared at him. “You let Celeste poison me.”

Matteo flinched.

Good, I thought.

Flinching meant something human remained.

“I knew she wanted leverage,” Matteo said. “Not poison.”

“That is a child’s defense.”

“I was a child when everyone lied to me.”

Damen stepped closer. “You are not a child now.”

Matteo’s eyes shone with resentment and grief. “Do you know what it is to find out your whole life is charity? That your name, your father, your place at the table—all borrowed?”

Damen’s voice remained steady. “Yes.”

Matteo laughed bitterly. “Of course you do. The great Damen Romano suffers too.”

Damen did not rise to it.

“Sofia said you let someone in.”

Matteo’s face crumpled before he could stop it.

“I was nineteen,” he said. “Celeste was older, beautiful, impossible. She said she needed to leave something for my father. I opened the garden gate. That was all.”

“No,” Damen said. “That was not all.”

Matteo looked at the floor.

“No.”

The silence after that one word was heavier than confession.

He gave us Celeste.

Not physically. She had fled. But he gave us her accounts, her false names, the apartments Aldo used, the lawyer who moved money, the priest who signed an empty burial record in Palermo.

By dusk, Damen had a plan.

By night, the burned greenhouse glowed with hidden lights and silent men.

I was not supposed to be there.

I went anyway.

Damen did not try to stop me. He only handed me a small earpiece and said, “Stay behind the stone wall. If anything feels wrong, you run.”

“With Ellie?”

“She is not here.”

Of course she was not supposed to be.

We had left her in the safest room of the estate with Lena, Atlas, my father, and enough guards to invade a courthouse.

But mothers know the exact shape of dread.

Half an hour into waiting, when Aldo’s black car appeared at the edge of the greenhouse path, my phone buzzed.

A text from Lena.

ELLIE IS ASLEEP. ALL CLEAR.

Relief hit first.

Then suspicion.

Lena never used periods in texts. She dictated messages. They came messy, fast, without polish.

I showed Damen.

His eyes hardened.

“Paul,” he said into his mic. “Check east wing.”

Aldo stepped from the car before Paul could answer.

He was older than I expected. Elegant. Silver-haired. Small compared with the men around him. But his presence was colder than theirs. He looked like a man who had spent decades teaching other people to bleed on his behalf.

Celeste stood beside him.

And in her arms, wrapped in a blanket, was Ellie.

My heart tore in half.

Damen’s hand clamped around my wrist before I could run.

“Breathe,” he whispered.

“I will kill her.”

“I know.”

Ellie saw us.

She did not scream.

My brave, strange little girl looked directly at Damen and mouthed one word.

Atlas.

From the darkness behind the greenhouse, a low growl rolled through the roses.