Chapter 5 - The Siege of the Neon Sign
By midnight, the storm outside had turned into a full-scale blizzard, blanketing the industrial district in a thick, suffocating blanket of white.
The front window of my shop had been temporarily boarded up with thick sheets of plywood by Roman’s tactical team, turning the brightly lit pet store into a dark, claustrophobic bunker. Inside, the air smelled of stale coffee, antiseptic, and the distinct, comforting musk of wet dog.
Titan was curled up in the center of the main room, his massive head resting on my rolled-up winter jacket. He was finally sleeping deeply, his breathing steady and rhythmic.
Across the room, sitting on an overturned grooming table, Roman was cleaning his sidearm with a methodical, soothing precision. He had removed his suit jacket entirely, wearing only a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing the lean, corded muscle of a man who didn’t just sit behind a mahogany desk.
“You should sleep,” Roman said without looking up from the barrel of his gun. “My men have the perimeter locked down. Nobody gets within three blocks without setting off our motion grids.”
“I’m not tired,” I said, leaning against the counter and sipping a mug of bitter black coffee. I watched him in the dim light of a single emergency lamp. “Tell me about them.”
“Them?”
“The men who came for him. You called them an asset. You said someone inside your company cut his tracker out. Who is trying to destroy you, Roman?”
He stopped cleaning the weapon. The silence in the room stretched for so long I thought he wouldn't answer. He set the gun down on the table with a soft click, folded his hands, and looked up at me.
“Calder Global is launching a multi-billion-dollar acquisition next month—a next-generation defense grid that will render traditional military contractors obsolete,” Roman said, his voice dangerously low. “A project like that creates enemies. On Wall Street, in Washington, and inside my own boardroom.”
“And Titan?”
“Titan wasn't just a guard dog,” Roman said, his eyes darkening. “He was trained as a living biometric vault. His microchip stores the encrypted private keys to the defense grid’s core servers—keys that cannot be hacked digitally without the physical host present.”
My breath caught in my throat. “They didn't just want to kill him. They wanted to harvest him.”
“Yes,” Roman said flatly. “And when my head of security, Marcus, reported that Titan had ‘escaped’ during a transport exercise three weeks ago, I knew it was an inside job. Marcus has been my right hand for ten years. If he’s the one who sold out the project... then I have a traitor sitting at the very top of my empire.”
Before I could process the sheer magnitude of the corporate conspiracy unfolding inside my little pet store, the low hum of the store’s emergency radio receiver crackled to life.
May you like
“Alpha to Command. Alpha to Command,” a voice hissed through the static, urgent and breathless. “We’ve got movement on the east perimeter. Multiple uninvited guests. They’re bypassing the motion grids—they’ve got corporate clearance codes. Repeat, they have—”*
A sudden, violent burst of static cut the transmission off mid-sentence.
