My voice was a low growl, rough like gravel in a mixer. It was the voice of a man who hadn’t used it for anything softer than a command in four years.
Titan didn’t move.
My German Shepherd, eighty-five pounds of disciplined muscle and lethal intelligence, stood frozen on the cracked sidewalk of the Gaslamp Quarter. His ears—usually swiveling like radar dishes, cataloging every threat in our perimeter—were locked forward. His body was a statue cast in tan and black iron.
“Titan,” I snapped, yanking the leash harder. “Now.”
Nothing.
In three years of service, through the worst episodes where I was shaking on the floor and he was the heavy weight keeping me tethered to gravity, Titan had never disobeyed. Not once. He was more machine than dog, programmed for precision, calibrated to my heart rate. If I spiked, he alerted. If I panicked, he guarded. If I walked, he walked.
But tonight, he was ignoring a direct order.
My heart hammered against my ribs—a staccato rhythm I knew too well. Threat assessment. My eyes, trained in the kill houses of Virginia and the dusty hellscapes of Yemen, scanned the environment. Shadows. Neon signs buzzing like trapped flies. The stench of stale urine and ocean salt. And people. The invisible people. The ones I had trained myself not to see.
