Chapter 3
The veterinarian came at eight and took forty minutes to deliver her verdict: underweight, mildly dehydrated, no broken bones, no infection, no sign of disease. “He’s fortunate,” she said, folding her stethoscope. “Another two days in that weather and we’d be having a different conversation.”
Mia stood on a chair so she could see the table, both hands flat on the edge of it. “He was cold.”
“I imagine he was.”
The veterinarian ran two fingers under the collar. “This needs to come off. It’s rubbing the skin raw.”
“Keep it,” Lorenzo said.
She looked up. “The collar?”
“Yes.”
“It’s filthy. And it’s too large for him. He’ll slip it in a month.”
“Keep it anyway.”
She unfastened it, and Lorenzo watched her hands do the thing he had been waiting for since the garden — she turned the buckle over, examined it for perhaps a second and a half with the incurious efficiency of a woman who had handled ten thousand collars, and slipped it into a clean paper sleeve without interest.
He almost asked her to look again.
Instead he said, “Leave it on the desk.”
She left at nine with instructions about feeding schedules, vaccinations, chewing, and the particular stubbornness of this breed. Mia listened to none of it. Lorenzo listened to all of it with the concentration he normally reserved for quarterly reports, and did not notice that he was doing so.
“And what’s his name?” the veterinarian asked, closing her case.
Mia turned immediately toward Lorenzo. Elena turned too.
Lorenzo looked at the puppy, which was attempting to eat the end of the stethoscope.
He had not considered a name. Names implied intention. Names were what you gave things you expected to remain. He had spent fifteen years not giving them — not to the men who came and went, not to the houses, not to the cars, and not, in any way that mattered, to himself.
“Leo,” he said.
The word arrived before he decided on it.
Mia’s eyes widened. “I wanted to help pick.”
“You can choose his nickname.”
She thought about it for several seconds with tremendous seriousness. “Leo.”
Elena pressed her lips together. The veterinarian looked down at her notes to hide a smile. Lorenzo inclined his head.
“Then we agree.”
Mia leaned close to the puppy and said, with the same serene certainty she had brought into the garden, “Leo Duca.”
Lorenzo’s gaze moved toward her. “Duca.”
“He lives here.”
Before he could object, Leo sneezed onto the veterinarian’s sleeve and settled the matter by falling asleep.
One night became two because the veterinarian said moving him would be stressful. Two became four because Mia pointed out that the food had already been opened. By the end of the week a small bed had appeared beside Lorenzo’s desk, a second water bowl had appeared in the private garden, and one of the guards had learned to open the side door without being asked whenever Leo approached it.
Nobody discussed how these things happened. They accumulated.
Lorenzo began walking the perimeter at sunrise because Leo woke before six and regarded a closed bedroom door as a personal insult. The first morning he tried to keep his usual pace; Leo stopped after thirty steps to investigate a wet leaf with such intensity that Lorenzo was obliged to wait. The second morning Leo became fascinated by the same stone for nearly a minute. By the third morning Lorenzo had, without noticing, shortened his stride.
Men who saw them from a distance developed sudden reasons to study hedges, radios, shoes, or the sky.
It was on the eighth day that Lorenzo finally took the paper sleeve out of the drawer.
He had been avoiding it. He could not have said why. He unfolded it under the lamp at his desk with Leo asleep on his shoe and the house silent around him, and turned the buckle over in his fingers.
The collar was worse than filthy. It was ancient — the leather cracked nearly through at one hole, the strap darkened with fifteen years of somebody’s hands. The buckle was brass, worn almost smooth, and under the grime and the oxidation, cut into the metal where a thumb would rest, were two letters.
R and D.
The stem of the R curved through the belly of the D. A narrow arrow crossed both of them diagonally, head pointing northeast.
Lorenzo stopped breathing.
He knew the mark. He had known it since he was nine years old, since a broad-shouldered man with scarred knuckles had knelt in front of him in a kennel yard and put a German Shepherd puppy into his arms and said, “This one’s yours. He’ll be better company than your father.”
Rocco Danalov had stamped that mark into everything he considered his. Holsters. Belts. Training leads. Kennel records. The collars of the dogs he raised for the Duca family, one of which was lying on the road in a photograph Lorenzo had not looked at in ten years.
Rocco had served Lorenzo’s father for two decades. Rocco had taught Lorenzo to load a rifle, to check a lock, to walk a room without being heard. Rocco had disappeared on the night Lorenzo’s parents were murdered, and for fifteen years one question had followed his name like a dog at heel.
Had Rocco died trying to protect them?
Or had he sold the route that killed them?
Lorenzo turned the buckle under the lamp, angling it, hoping the mark might resolve into something else — a scratch, a flaw in the brass, a trick of the light.
It did not.
Somebody had put a dog marked by Rocco Danalov inside the walls of the Duca estate, through a gate that had been locked for fifteen years, past a camera that had been turned deliberately toward a blank wall.
May you like
He sat with that for a long time. Then he reached for the intercom.
“Send Elena Marchetti to the study.”
