Chapter 4 - THE WOLF AT THE DOORThe red emergency backup lights kicked on, casting long, bloody shadows across the minimalist luxury of the penthouse.
“We’ve been flagged,” Marcus snarled, drawing his Glock 19 with a crisp metallic slide-rack. He rushed to the smart-glass window, peering down forty stories toward the rain-slicked street below. “Boss, three unmarked black SUVs just pulled up outside. Men in tactical gear—no insignia, full face-masks. They didn’t use the lobby; they just breached the service elevators.”
Victor didn’t panic. Empires weren’t built by men who flinched at the first sign of a siege. He calmly closed the encrypted file on his terminal, pocketed the matchstick drive, and turned around.
“They tracked the data ping the second we unlocked the drive,” Victor said, his voice entirely steady. “They didn't just want to hide a war crime, Marcus. They wanted the drive back, and they left a digital homing beacon inside the micro-capsule to find it.”
Titan stood by the center of the room. The dog’s ears were pinned back flat against his skull, his muscles bunched like coiled springs. He didn’t bark. He didn’t whine. He turned his head toward the reinforced steel private-elevator doors at the end of the corridor, where a muffled, metallic clunk echoed through the drywall.
They were cutting the locks.
“How many?” Victor asked.
“At least six,” Marcus muttered, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. “Professional grade. Delta or SAD-contracted clean-up crew. They’re going to sweep the floor and leave no survivors, Boss.”
Victor walked over to a heavy mahogany display case resting against the library wall. He punched a biometric code into the glass panel, sliding it open to reveal an array of customized firearms. He bypassed the handguns, reaching instead for a suppressed SIG Sauer MPX submachine gun and two extra magazines, tossing one flawlessly to Marcus.
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“They think they’re hunting a broken dog and a mobster,” Victor said, racking the bolt with a satisfying clack. “They don’t realize they just walked into an ambush.”
At that exact moment, the reinforced steel elevator doors blew outward in a deafening concensus of white-hot C4 charges. A shockwave of smoke, dust, and flying steel shrapnel tore down the corridor.
