He leaped full force, teeth sinking through reinforced plastic, jaws crushing the edge as passengers shrieked, stumbling away while phones lifted high to film the “crazy police dog going rogue.” The carousel shuddered to a stop under the violence of the sudden impact, alarms chimed, and someone shouted about lawsuits while Ethan climbed onto the belt, arms around Kane, trying desperately to pull him back.
He couldn’t.
Kane wasn’t behaving like an officer’s partner.
He was behaving like something inside that suitcase had personally terrified him.
“Officer Cole! Get control of him!” demanded Chief Inspector Lydia Hart, storming toward them, the kind of leader who breathed rules and obeyed them like religion.
“I’m trying!” Ethan yelled back. But then something else happened—something that froze every voice in the room.
From inside the cracked case:
Thump.
Not mechanical. Not accidental.
Alive.
Kane whimpered, releasing his crushing bite only enough to press his nose into the gap he’d created, as if apologizing, pleading, begging Ethan to do the thing procedures wouldn’t allow.
Something inside needed saving.
And fast.
Chapter 2: When Silence Screams
The world stopped pretending this was normal.
Security sealed the area, evacuating civilians in widening circles while Ethan forced the suitcase open against strict orders, because for once he didn’t care if paperwork buried him—better paper than bodies. The case hissed open like something exhaling after suffocating too long.
Everyone prepared for explosives.
No one prepared for what they actually saw.
A tiny crate.
Soundproof foam.
A newborn life trembling inside.
A fragile Siberian husky pup, barely old enough to understand air, fur soaked, paws shaking weakly, ribs screaming through its skin as it tried to breathe in a space never meant for breathing. A surgical scar cut across its side. Transparent tubing disappeared beneath flesh.
A sleek titanium cylinder blinked blue.
A ticking digital timer glared back:
00:39:59
Chief Hart whispered, “Dear God… it’s wired…”
People assumed bomb.
They were wrong.
The tube was feeding something into the puppy.
Kane pressed his muzzle gently against the puppy’s cage, uttering the softest cry Ethan had ever heard come out of him.
“This isn’t a weapon,” Ethan whispered with sickening realization.
“This is a host.”
And just when the horror seemed complete, intelligence arrived with a cruelty that felt personal. The device wasn’t military. It wasn’t even conventional terrorism.
It was biomedical.
A weaponized viral prototype, designed to use a living creature as an incubation chamber, to acclimate, mutate, and then burst into the environment like an invisible demon once the timer hit zero. A silent catastrophe waiting to bloom in one of the busiest hubs in the world.
They had only minutes.
And Ethan knew the government answer before anyone spoke it.
Euthanize the host. Burn it. Contain the threat.
Only problem?
Kane stood guard, teeth bare, body between the men with guns and the trembling pup, because dogs recognize innocence long before humans do, and Ethan found himself drawing his weapon too—only not at the dog.
At the people aiming to kill a baby.
“If you shoot him,” Ethan said dangerously calm, “you write another headline about a dead animal while the real monster walks out of this building laughing.”
Because Ethan understood something the suits never did:
Weapons don’t cry.
Weapons don’t tremble in pain.
Weapons don’t look at you desperately hoping life is worth trusting.
Victims do.
And Kane?
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