Chapter 4 - The Ambush in the HallwayThe front door of the Calloway Animal Clinic didn't just open; it splintered inward with a deafening crash as a heavy iron crowbar popped the vintage deadbolt.
Two men stepped through the threshold, cloaked in black wool coats, snow swirling around their boots. Salvatore, a massive brute with a broken nose and thick cauliflower ears, led the way, a suppressed Sig Sauer pistol held low and level in his right hand. Behind him came Frankie, a younger, jittery enforcer whose eyes darted frantically around the dimly lit waiting room, taking in the cages, the reception desk, and the spiral staircase leading upstairs.
"Check the back," Salvatore grunted, his voice like gravel grinding in a cement mixer. "Dario wants the kid alive if he crawls, but if he fights, a corpse is just easier to drag."
Frankie nodded, stepping toward the hallway leading to the back examination rooms.
He didn't make it past the second doorway.
A shadow dropped from the darkness of the upper landing like an executioner's axe. Nico landed squarely on Frankie’s shoulders, his weight driving the younger enforcer face-first into the hardwood floor with a sickening crunch of broken nasal cartilage and a muffled scream. Before Frankie could even twitch, Nico’s hands clamped around his wrist, twisting the gun-wielding arm at an unnatural angle until the pistol clattered across the polished linoleum.
"Who sent you?" Nico hissed right into Frankie’s ear, pressing a knee directly into the man’s spine.
"V-Vittorio..." Frankie choked out, spitting blood onto the floor. "Dario... they said—"
Salvatore reacted with terrifying speed. Hearing the scuffle, he whirled around, raising his Sig Sauer directly toward the ceiling where Nico knelt. "Drop him, you little—"
BOOM.
The deafening roar of Sarah’s 12-gauge shotgun shook the walls of the clinic. Pellets chewed through the drywall inches from Salvatore’s head, showering him in white plaster dust and deafening him in one ear.
"Get out of my clinic!" Sarah roared from the top of the stairs, her gray sweater bristling, her shotgun reloaded with brutal, practiced efficiency.
Salvatore cursed, ducking behind the reinforced wooden reception desk as return fire. He fired two rapid shots upward through the ceiling, wood splinters raining down over Sarah’s head. "Old bitch! You’re dead too!"
Nico didn't wait. He drove his heel down into the back of Frankie’s head, knocking him cold instantly, then lunged forward across the hallway, sliding across the slick floor straight toward the reception desk where Salvatore was reloading.
Salvatore caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and swung the pistol barrel around. But Nico was already there. He slammed his forearm upward into Salvatore’s wrist, forcing the gun to fire harmlessly into the floorboards.
The two men crashed into a heavy metal filing cabinet, sending medical charts flying like autumn leaves. Salvatore, outweighing Nico by at least thirty pounds, threw a brutal, kidney-punching left hook that drove the wind from Nico’s lungs. Nico staggered back, gasping, tasting copper.
Salvatore grinned, wiping blood from his ear. "You think you're still a boss, kid? You’re nothing. You’re just a stray, just like that damn dog."
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He lunged forward for a finishing blow—and stopped dead.
A massive, one-hundred-fifty-pound black shape launched itself out of the surgery room door. Titan, ignoring the freshly stitched muscle in his shoulder, hit Salvatore square in the chest like a freight train. The sheer momentum drove the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound enforcer backward through the front glass window of the clinic in an explosion of flying shards and freezing morning air.
