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Chapter Thirty-Four
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2026-10-12 15:32:26Dessert arrived—tiramisu, homemade, with layers so precise they looked architectural. I was halfway through my second bite when Antonio's phone buzzed.
Not a text notification. A ringtone. His whole posture changed. The easy lean into the table vanished. His shoulders squared. His&nb
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After Hours Service Chapter Forty
I should have been watching the pasta. I was not watching the pasta. I was watching his hands. The way his long fingers pressed into the dough, folding it, guiding it, the flour catching in the lines of his knuckles and the creases of his palms. The tendons in his forearms shifting beneath the ink — dark patterns I couldn't fully see from this angle, but which I knew from previous close inspection involved script and geometric shapes and at least one image that looked like a family crest.He had surgeon's hands. That was what I'd thought the first time I'd treated his gunshot wound, when I'd had to cut through his shirt and examine the entry wound in his left shoulder. Steady, precise, capable of both violence and gentleness depending on the instruction they received."You're staring," he said."I'm observing the pasta.""You're observing my hands.""The hands are part of the pasta process. They're instrumental. I'm being thorough."He set down th
After Hours Service Chapter Thirty-Nine
The GPS announced I had arrived at my destination, and I sat in my parked car for a full thirty seconds, staring at the iron gates and the stone house beyond them. Not a restaurant. Not a hotel rooftop with linen tablecloths and a sommelier. A house. Antonio's house. Unlike the day I came to check Rico's paw, we would be entirely alone tonight.The gates opened on their own, and I pulled my secondhand Civic up a gravel drive that curved between trimmed hedges. The house was old stone, sprawling, the kind of place that probably had a name etched above the door in Italian. But the lights glowing from the ground-floor windows were warm and yellow, and when I stepped out of the car, I could smell something that made my stomach clench with immediate, Pavlovian hunger.Garlic. Butter. Something herbal and rich, drifting from an open window.I'd dressed for an extravagant evening. Fitted black shirt, dark jeans, the one pair of boots I owned that didn't have animal sedative splashed across t
After Hours Service Chapter Thirty-Eight
I kissed him harder. My hands moved higher beneath his shirt, mapping the ridges of his ribs, the ink I couldn't see but could feel under my fingertips. His hand slid from my waist to my lower back, pressing me against him, and I felt the hard length of him against my thigh.Then the world tilted, and I was on my back, the couch cushions soft beneath my shoulders, Antonio above me. His weight settled between my hips, his forearms braced on either side of my head, and he kissed my neck with slow, open-mouthed kisses, his tongue tracing the line of my pulse. My fingers fisted in his shirt, pulling it up his back, and my hips arched against him without my permission.He groaned against my throat. The sound traveled through me like a current, pooling low in my belly, and I wrapped my leg around his calf, pulling him closer.Then he stopped.His mouth left my neck. His weight shifted. He braced himself above me, breathing hard, his amber eyes dark in the low light. I made an involuntary so
After Hours Service Chapter Thirty-Seven
After dinner, Antonio found a speaker and connected his phone to it. Music filled the house. It was something old and Italian, with a guitar line that wound through the room like smoke. He offered his hand.I kicked off my sneakers. He pulled off his boots. We danced in the living room, barefoot on the hardwood floor, the lake visible through the windows, the last light of the day turning the water copper.He was a graceful dancer. He was deliberate, leading with his shoulders, his hand on the small of my back, his steps measured and slightly off-beat. I followed because the alternative was stepping on his feet, and because his hand on my back made me want to stay exactly where I was."Why did you start the clinic?" he asked as he spun me in time to the music."Because I couldn't work anywhere else," I told him, my cheek near his shoulder. "I applied to three corporate practices. They all wanted production quotas. They demanded their vets push unnecessary procedures, sell prescription
After Hours Service Chapter Thirty-Six
I checked my phone while Lindsey processed the discharge paperwork. A text from Antonio, timestamped 1:23 a.m.The Dogfather: How's work?I glanced at the biohazard bin, where the sock lay in state. I snapped a photo of it, a damp, wrinkled tube sock in all its revolting glory, and sent.Evidence of attempted sockicide. Victim survived. Perpetrator unrepentant.His response came thirty seconds later.The Dogfather: Is sockicide a real word?It is now. I'm coining it. Veterinary forensics.A pause.The Dogfather: Whose sock is it?I looked at Princess Buttercup, who was attempting to lick her ears. I looked at her owner, who was reading the discharge instructions with the furrowed brow of someone encountering complex legal documents.Nobody knows. It materialized from the void. The dog found it somewhere in the ether and consumed it as an offering.The Dogfather: That's deeply disturbing.Welcome to veterinary medicine.Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.The Dogfather: D
After Hours Service Chapter Thirty-Five
Walter Cronkite sat on my exam table with the glassy indifference of a reptile who had made a terrible life choice and felt no particular urgency about it. The bearded dragon's throat pulsed, his tiny prehistoric eyes tracking my penlight with the faint interest of someone watching a moderately entertaining television program through a window. His X-ray glowed on the lightbox behind me, a tiny Lego brick sitting in his digestive tract like a geometric monument to poor judgment."Can you explain how this happened?" I asked Walter Cronkite directly, shining the penlight into his left eye. He blinked, slow and reptilian, offering nothing.His owner, a fourteen-year-old kid named Trevor with the slouching posture of someone who had been lectured at length already tonight, shifted his weight from one sneaker to the other. "I don't know. He just — I left some stuff on my desk, and—""And Walter Cronkite decided to sample the inventory." I turned back to the X-ray. The Lego was small enough
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