Chapter 1 - The Blood in the Snow
The mafia boss’s dog had just attacked a professional handler so badly that the man fled through the estate gates bleeding when my maid’s three-year-old daughter walked directly toward him, clutching a small laundry cloth in her hand. I was certain I was seconds away from witnessing something horrific, but instead, the animal that had obeyed only me for ten years ignored my order, rested his enormous head in the little girl’s lap, and exposed a secret someone inside my estate had been trying to keep from me.
Snow had covered my Chicago estate throughout the night.
By sunrise, the service courtyard rested beneath a thin layer of white, looking strangely peaceful.
But it wasn’t.
Nero stood in the middle of the courtyard, drenched and furious.
An overturned washbasin sat nearby. His leash had been left beside the drain, while small drops of blood marked a trail through the snow toward the east gate.
The handler was already gone.
He had lasted exactly twelve minutes.
Before leaving, he told my guards there wasn’t enough money in the world to make him return. Double his pay wouldn’t do it. Neither would triple.
I knew why.
Nero was no ordinary dog.
For more than a decade, he had stayed beside me through situations that would have broken most men. He had protected me without hesitation. Once, during a warehouse fire, he refused to leave until he knew I had made it outside safely.
But something about him was different that morning.
His left hind leg was shaking.
And when I heard the deep growl rumbling inside his chest, I realized it didn’t sound like anger.
It sounded like pain.
Then Sienna screamed.
“Where’s Elsie?”
My maid rushed through the servants’ doorway, only to stop so abruptly that another woman nearly ran into her from behind.
Her three-year-old daughter was already in the courtyard.
Elsie wore an oversized red wool coat, its buttons fastened crookedly across her little chest. In one hand, she carried her worn teddy bear.
In the other, she held a folded white laundry cloth.
“Elsie,” Sienna whispered. “Honey, don’t move.”
Elsie kept walking toward Nero.
I stepped beneath the stone archway.
“Everyone stay away from the dog.”
My men immediately moved back.
Sienna couldn’t.
I understood.
That was her little girl walking toward an animal that grown men were terrified to approach.
Elsie stopped about three feet from Nero.
Then she calmly sat down.
I lifted a hand toward my guards.
No one moved.
For several seconds, it felt as though the entire courtyard had stopped breathing.
Elsie gently placed her teddy bear in the snow. She unfolded the white cloth, reached forward, and pressed it carefully against Nero’s wet shoulder.
The growling stopped.
“You’re cold,” she whispered.
She wiped his fur once more.
Then she said something that immediately drew my eyes toward the abandoned leash.
“The bad man is gone now. It’s okay, friend.”
The bad man?
Before I could ask her what she meant, Nero suddenly moved.
Sienna gasped.
But Nero didn’t attack.
The enormous black dog slowly lowered his body onto the wet stone.
Then he rested his massive head in Elsie’s lap.
For a moment, I couldn’t believe my own eyes.
“Bruno,” I said softly, using the old command name known only to him. “Come.”
One of his ears twitched.
But he remained beside her.
“Bruno. Come.”
Nero simply closed his eyes.
In ten years, he had never ignored one of my commands.
Not once.
Yet now he lay completely at peace beneath the gentle hands of a three-year-old child.
Elsie smiled as she began drying the fur behind his ear.
Then she froze.
The smile vanished from her face.
Her tiny fingers had found something concealed beneath Nero’s thick black fur.
Something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
She stared down at it.
Then slowly raised her eyes to me.
“Mister Alessio?”
Something in her voice had changed.
For the first time, I walked toward them.
And the moment I saw what was hidden beneath Nero’s fur, I finally understood why my dog had attacked the handler.
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Someone inside my own estate had hurt him.
And Nero had spent the entire morning trying to warn me.
