Chapter 4 - THE CYLINDER UNDER THE SCAR
The blood froze in my veins.
The radio static hissed in the cold room like a snake.
"My shelter?" I stammered, stepping toward the fallen radio.
"What does he mean?"
Dominic snatched the radio from the floor and clicked the transmitter.
"Moretti," Dominic growled.
"Ah, the big bad boss," Victor Moretti’s voice crackled back through the tiny speaker.
"You think you won that dog, Dominic?"
"Julian died for nothing."
"The shelter on 47th Street—Hope Haven Rescue."
Victor chuckled.
A wet, rattling sound that made my skin crawl.
"Your sweet little waitress spent three years building that place, didn't she?"
"Thirty dogs inside right now."
"Six litters of pups."
"My boys are standing outside with five gallons of industrial kerosene."
"No!" I screamed, lunging for the radio.
Dominic caught my wrist with an iron grip.
His touch was firm, grounding me against the floor.
"What do you want, Victor?" Dominic demanded into the mic.
"Bring the dog to the old railyards in Pullman," Victor said.
"Two hours."
"If I see a single Castellano soldier, the shelter goes up in flames."
"The dogs burn first."
"Then the neighborhood."
The radio clicked dead.
Silence dropped over the shattered dining room.
I looked at Dominic.
Panic was clawing up my throat, suffocating me.
"Thirty dogs," I whispered, tears burning behind my eyes.
"Three years of my life."
"Disabled animals, Dominic."
"They can't run."
Dominic looked at me.
His dark eyes were impossible to read.
He didn't panic.
He didn't yell.
He stood up, towering over me in the amber emergency light.
"Matteo," Dominic barked.
"Sir?"
"Dispatch three intercept teams to 47th Street."
"Unmarked vehicles. Silent approach."
"If anyone is holding a fuel canister within two blocks of that shelter, put a bullet through their skull."
"Understood," Matteo said, already tapping his encrypted phone.
"Wait," I said, stepping between them.
"Moretti's men are already watching the perimeter."
"If your soldiers show up, they light the match."
"They're expecting a raid."
Dominic looked down at me.
"Then what do you suggest, Nora?"
"We give them what they want," I said.
My voice surprised me.
It was steady.
The panic was gone, replaced by a cold, burning clarity.
"We take Zeus to Pullman."
Dominic shook his head.
"Victor will kill the dog, take the drive, and execute you."
"Not if the drive isn't inside him," I said.
Dominic frowned.
His gaze dropped to Zeus’s scarred ribcage.
"The drive is encapsulated beneath the subcutaneous fascia," Dominic said.
"It requires surgical extraction."
"I have a veterinary degree," I said, stepping closer to him.
"I spent four years doing emergency trauma surgery on rescue dogs."
"I can remove that cylinder in twenty minutes without hurting him."
"Where?" Dominic asked.
"In your private veterinary suite," I answered.
"You have one, don't you?"
"A man who rescues an abused fighting pit bull doesn't take him to a public clinic."
One corner of Dominic’s mouth twitched upward.
A faint, lethal smirk.
"Smart girl," he murmured.
Ten minutes later, we were in the basement of the Castellano estate.
The room looked like a high-end human surgical theater.
Stainless steel tables, sterile autoclaves, surgical lamps, and monitoring screens.
Dominic had prepared for everything.
Zeus lay on his side on the padded surgical table.
He didn't need to be strapped down.
My hand rested on his broad forehead, stroking the soft fur between his ears.
"You're safe, buddy," I whispered.
"I'm right here."
Zeus gave a soft, shuddering sigh and closed his eyes.
I prepped the scalpel.
I injected a local nerve block around the scar tissue.
My hands were completely steady.
Dominic stood across the table from me, holding the sterile gauze and suction.
He didn't flinch as I made a clean, two-inch incision along the old scar line.
Blood welled.
Dominic dabbed it away instantly with surgical precision.
"You're good with your hands," Dominic observed softly.
"You have to be when an animal's life depends on millimeters," I replied.
My forceps touched something hard beneath the muscle wall.
A metallic click.
Carefully, I teased the tissue away.
I clamped the end of a titanium cylinder and slid it free from the pocket of flesh.
It was two inches long, sealed with waterproof rubber gaskets.
The master key to Chicago’s darkest secrets.
"Julian’s ledger," Dominic murmured, staring at the cylinder.
I quickly sutured the incision with clean, tight dissolving stitches.
I applied an antibiotic bandage over Zeus’s flank.
Zeus stirred, lifting his head to lick my fingers.
"Good boy," I smiled, kissing his broad nose.
Dominic wiped the blood from the titanium cylinder with a sterile cloth.
He unscrewed the end cap.
Inside was a high-density micro-drive.
"Now we have the drive," I said, looking up at Dominic.
"What do we bring to Pullman?"
Dominic reached into his pocket and pulled out a blank steel dummy drive of the exact same weight.
"We bring a corpse," Dominic said.
"Whose?"
Suddenly, the security alarms on the basement console began to shriek.
Red strobes flashed across the stainless-steel walls.
The heavy hydraulic doors of the basement slammed shut and sealed with a hiss of compressed air.
The digital monitoring screen on the wall flickered to life.
A face appeared on the high-definition monitor.
It was Matteo.
Standing inside the estate's central server room, holding a severed fiber-optic cable in his bloody hands.
"Matteo," Dominic whispered, his voice freezing into absolute zero.
"I'm sorry, Dominic," Matteo spoke through the intercom.
"Victor paid off my debts in Macau."
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"He has thirty men surrounding this bunker right now."
"And the ventilation shafts are already pumping in carbon monoxide."
