Pups

※※※Cross

The Alpine facility. The stark, clinical fight arena. Her.

That was not Lissa.

The girl in the video moved with a lethal, polished efficiency that was terrifying. Her strikes were sharp, her grapples technical, her eyes... God, her eyes. They were flat. Dead. Like two chips of arctic ice. She dismantled her first three opponents without a flicker of emotion. It was the fourth fight that started the unraveling. The hit to the head. The stumble. For a second, her guard slipped, and I saw a flash of something—pain, confusion—before it was ruthlessly stamped out. Then the weapons round. The misstep, the brutal stab to her hip. And then...

The transformation.

I’d seen rage before. I lived in it. But this was different. This wasn’t the hot, explosive anger of a fighter losing control. This was something colder, deeper, a geyser of pure nihilistic fury erupting from a place that had been sealed off and pressurized for two years. She’d dropped the knife. She’d abandoned all technique. She’d just... destroyed the other girl. Methodically. Viciously. With a kind of focused savagery that made my own professional violence look tame.

The Don will be happy. The bitter thought was like acid in my throat. This is what he wanted. He made me break her heart so she could be reforged into this... weapon. A hollow, perfect soldier. He got his wish. He’d traded his daughter’s soul for a sharper blade.

The plane touched down at Teterboro. I didn’t go home. I went straight to the house, the Damingo estate, my bike eating up the familiar roads on autopilot. The cold night air did nothing to clear my head.

I walked into his study without knocking. Salvatore was at his desk, reviewing papers. He looked up, his expression shifting from mild surprise to sharp focus as he took in my face.

“Enzo. You’re back early. Report.”

I didn’t say a word. I pulled the encrypted tablet from my jacket, navigated to the file, and placed it on the desk in front of him. I hit play.

I watched his face as he watched. Saw the initial pride in the set of his jaw as she dominated the early rounds. Saw the flicker of concern at the headshot. Then came the weapons fight. The stab. The... eruption.

His face changed. The pride drained away, replaced by a slow-dawning horror. His eyes, usually so unreadable, widened slightly. His breath hitched. He watched, frozen, as his daughter beat another human being into a bloody pulp on a gym mat. When the video ended with instructors pulling her off, her chest heaving, eyes vacant, he was silent for a long, tense moment.

He slowly looked up at me. The horror was gone, banked behind a wall of forced calm, but I’d seen it. I’d caught the monster off guard.

“You didn’t want her broken,” I said, my voice low and raw, the words cracking like a whip in the quiet room. “You wanted her strong. That’s not strong. That’s broken. The girl we knew is gone. Replaced by a soldier, one with no spark. No light. Nothing left inside to fight for. Just something to fight with. Did you see her eyes at the end? There was nothing there.”

He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers, a classic gesture of his to regain composure. “It is a difficult environment. The pressure...”

“Don’t,” I cut him off, a dangerous move, but I was past caring. “Don’t justify it. You sent me there to make sure she was ‘progressing.’ This is what progressing looks like to you? A robot who snaps and nearly kills a classmate?”

He was quiet again, his gaze distant. “Did she see you?”

“No. I don’t think so. She took a pretty hard knock to the head right before... and the blade on the side. She was in her own world.” The memory of her staggering, her eyes glazed, sent a fresh wave of nausea through me. “She’ll be okay. Physically, I think. The rest...” I trailed off, the sentence too awful to finish.

He nodded slowly, then surprised me. “I will take a week’s leave. Go see her myself.”

My head snapped up. “Sir?”

“I cannot trust anyone else’s assessment with this. Not fully. I need to see her.” He met my eyes, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of the father, not the don. It was buried under layers of duty and cold calculation, but it was there. A thread of genuine, paternal fear. “Thank you for going, Enzo.”

“Anytime, sir,” I muttered, the formal response automatic. My mind was already reeling. Salvatore Damingo, leaving his empire for a week to personally check on his daughter. The world was tilting off its axis.

I left the study, the heavy door closing with behind me. I didn’t go home. I went straight to The Crucible. I needed a drink that would burn, and I needed to hit something until my hands bled.

The club was in its pre-fight lull, the air thick with anticipation and stale smoke. I bypassed the bar and went straight to the back gym. I didn’t wrap my hands. I just walked up to the heavy bag and started pounding.

Thud. Thud. THUD.

Each impact was the sound of the training knife hitting her hip. Thud. THUD. The crack of Mei Lin’s jaw. THUD. THUD. THUD. The dead, empty look in Lissa’s eyes at the end.

She was broken. And I was the one who handed Salvatore the hammer. I’d followed orders. I’d built the distance. I’d shattered her heart thinking it would make her resilient. Instead, it had made her hollow. There was no fixing this. You can’t glue together ashes.

My knuckles were split and bleeding, matching the phantom pain in my hip, my soul. I finally stopped, leaning my forehead against the cool, leather of the bag, breathing in ragged gasps.

Focus. The word was a lifeline in the storm of guilt and grief. I had to focus. I couldn’t fall apart. Not now.

I had Lux opening tonight.

My club. My first venture that wasn’t built on blood and violence. A high-end lounge in the Meatpacking District, all velvet ropes, crystal chandeliers, and obscenely expensive liquor. Private rooms in the back for whatever illicit deals or liaisons the city’s elite could imagine. It was clean money, or as clean as it got in our world. It was legitimacy. A stepping stone. It was supposed to be the beginning of building something a girl like her—the girl she was—could one day be part of without getting her hands dirty.

Now, the irony was a knife twist. I was building a palace of velvet and light while the princess was turning into a feral beast in a concrete cage overseas.

I pushed off the bag, wiping my bloody knuckles on my jeans. I looked at my reflection in the gym’s smeared mirror. Cross looked back, his eyes shadowed, a fresh cut on his cheekbone from a job four nights ago. The monster in the mirror.

She is broken. And there is no way I am going to be able to fix this.

The thought was a death sentence. But I had to bury it. Deep.

I had a club to open. A reputation to solidify. An empire to help run. That was my focus now. The only thing left.

The ghost of the girl on the cliffs, the one who laughed into the wind with her arms around me, was gone. In her place was a soldier with dead eyes and a man in a bloodstained gym who had helped kill her.

I walked out of The Crucible, heading towards the soft glow of Lux. The show had to go on. Even if the only audience that mattered was forever lost.

The next day.

The box was whimpering.

That’s what caught my attention, cutting through the low-grade headache from last night’s bourbon. A soft, pathetic, squeaky sound from the alley beside the coffee shop. I was just coming out, a black coffee in hand—no sugar, no cream, just like my life these days—when the sound hooked me.

I peered into the dim alley. There, against a dumpster, was a soggy cardboard box. Inside, a squirming mass of black and tan fur. Four Doberman puppies, maybe six weeks old, their ribs showing, eyes still too blue, shivering in the morning chill. Someone had dumped them. Probably some backyard breeder who couldn’t sell the “defective” ones.

I stood there for a long minute, the steam from my coffee curling into the cold air. I should keep walking. I had a dozen meetings. The Lux expansion. A sit-down with the Irish about territory. Pups were a complication. A vulnerability.

One of them, a little black female, stumbled to the edge of the box, tipped over, and let out a particularly desperate squeak.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.

Twenty minutes later, I was walking into my house with a cardboard box of wriggling, whining puppies tucked under one arm, my coffee abandoned on a fire hydrant. The doorman, Bruno’s nephew Marco, raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Smart kid.

I gave two away. The two biggest males. Called up a guy I knew who ran a security dog training outfit. They’d have a good life and a job. But the girls... the little black one and a sleek brown one with intelligent, watchful eyes... I looked at them, these tiny, discarded things, and something in my chest, something I thought had petrified, gave a faint, rusty creak.

“Alright,” I said, my voice gruff in the empty silence of my house. “You can stay. But you have to earn your keep. No shitting on the Italian marble.”

I named them on the spot. I named them Chloe and Nyx. Goddess of the night. Seemed fitting.

“I’ll be good to you girls,” I promised them, my voice low. It was the most sincere thing I’d said to anyone in years. “I promise.”

My new home was a three-story fortress of black steel and tinted glass in Tribeca, a monument to everything I’d built and everything I’d become. Every window was bulletproof. Every door had biometric locks. The security system could withstand a small army. It was cold, sleek, and impenetrable. And it was mine.

I got the pups settled in a sprawling, padded enclosure in the living area, filled with the ridiculous amount of stuff I’d had my assistant buy—plush beds, chew toys that looked like designer handbags, and the most expensive puppy food on the market. They tumbled over each other, exploring, their earlier fear forgotten in this new, bizarre palace. Watching them, a strange, quiet warmth spread through the hollowed-out places inside me. It was fleeting, but it was real.

Later, needing a specific tool for a modification I was planning on the new bike, I walked into the climate-controlled garage. It housed my current toys: a matte-black Aston Martin, a vintage Ford pickup I was restoring, and my newest obsession—a Kawasaki Ninja H2, a carbon-fiber beast of a motorcycle that screamed like a banshee and could outrun the devil. It was pure, unadulterated speed. No nostalgia. No memories.

And then I saw her.

In the far corner, under a tailored grey canvas cover, was a silhouette I’d know in my sleep. The old Triumph Bonneville. The bike I’d rebuilt with my own hands. The bike she’d ridden on, her arms wrapped around me, her laughter stolen by the wind on the coast road. The bike that belonged to a boy named Enzo.

The memories hit with the force of a physical blow. The smell of salt air and her shampoo. The feel of her body pressed against my back, trusting. The way she’d trace patterns on my shoulders with her fingertips at red lights. The look of pure, unguarded joy on her face when we’d hit an open stretch.

It hurt too much. So I’d had her covered up. A ghost in the garage. A relic from a dead world.

I turned my back on the covered shape and walked to the ninja, running a hand over its cold, predatory lines. This was my toy now. Fast. Dangerous. Emotionless.

Life had turned out... good. By every objective measure. I was rich. I was feared. I had properties, businesses, and a reputation that opened doors and made men step aside.

And I was a bastard.

The women were a rotating cast. Models, socialites, the occasional dangerous woman from a rival outfit looking for a thrill. I didn’t keep them. I fucked them. One night, maybe two if the chemistry were particularly distracting. No dinners. No conversations that mattered. No mornings after. I’d escort them out, my expression blank, and close the door on the silence. It was transactional. It was empty. It was control.

And tonight, we were having a party at Lux.

The club would be packed. The music would be deafening. The champagne would flow like water. There would be women, plenty of them, casting glances my way. I’d pick one, maybe two. Take them to one of the soundproofed private rooms. Lose myself in the physical noise for an hour. It was routine.

I was finally where I needed to be. At the top. Or close enough to smell it.

But standing in my garage, between the ghost of a dead love and the beast of a machine that couldn’t feel anything, with the distant, happy yips of two puppies echoing from upstairs, the truth was a cold stone in my gut.

I was lonely.

A deep, profound, echoing loneliness that no amount of money, power, or meaningless sex could touch. I had not loved anyone else. Not even close. The part of me capable of that had been cauterized the night I told Lissa we were over.

And now... she was coming back soon. Her time at the Union was almost up. Salvatore’s visit had confirmed it. She was graduating. Returning to take her place.

But whoever was coming back... She wasn’t the same girl.

She was a woman now. A soldier. Hardened. Hollowed out. The video evidence was seared into my brain. The dead eyes. The ruthless violence. The complete absence of the soft, luminous soul I’d fallen for.

I had spent four years building myself into a king of a certain dark kingdom, preparing for a future I could barely envision, telling myself it was all for some distant, impossible chance.

And I realized, with a jolt that felt like stepping into empty air, that I was not ready for her. Not for this version of her.

I wasn’t ready to face the living consequence of what I’d done. To look into the eyes of the soldier and see no trace of the girl. To know I had helped create her and, in doing so, had destroyed the only thing I’d ever truly wanted.

The party tonight would be a roar of light and sound.But here, in the quiet garage, with the past under a sheet and the future a terrifying question, the loneliness wasn’t just an absence. It was a presence. It was the only thing in my life that felt completely, undeniably real.