Before she slipped out, she set a small recording device where it would capture everything, its feed running live to a secure server far beyond the reach of anyone in that hospital, so that whatever happened in that room at two a.m. would exist, permanently, in a place my enemies could never reach or erase.

That was the whole of my plan, and I want to be clear about what it was and what it was not.

It was not vengeance, and it was not an ambush meant to end in blood.

I am not a violent man, whatever my enemies believed, and I had no interest in trading one killing for another.

What I wanted was the one thing that could make me permanently safe: proof.

Irrefutable, recorded, undeniable proof, of exactly who had tried to murder me and exactly how, captured in their own voices, in the act, so that when the reckoning came it would come through the law, complete and airtight and beyond any lawyer’s power to unravel.