Chapter 1 — The Call

The nurse was crying so hard I could barely make out her words over the static of a line stretched halfway around the world.

And then she said the sentence that turned the blood in my veins to ice.

“Micah.

They hurt your wife.

Badly.”

I was standing in a military transit barracks five thousand miles from home, still in dusty combat boots, base alarms humming somewhere beyond the concrete walls.

“What happened to Camila?” I said.

“She came into County Memorial half an hour ago.

She’s badly injured.

Severe.

She keeps whispering your name.” I will not repeat the full clinical list the nurse gave me, because I have never been able to say those words aloud, not once in the years since, and because the specific catalogue of what was done to my wife is hers, not mine, and not a thing to be handed to a stranger for effect.

It is enough to say that my wife had been violently attacked, that she was in emergency surgery, and that she was, at that moment, five thousand miles beyond my reach.

And then the phone scraped against a desk, and a different voice took it — a low, arrogant laugh I recognized instantly.

Trent Prescott.

“Come do something about it, soldier,” he whispered into the receiver.

“My father owns the police.” The line went dead.

And for exactly three seconds, I stared at the black screen of my phone, and everything Trent Prescott and his father believed of me, everything they were counting on, turned on what I did next.