William Sterling stared at the piece of metal resting against his shoe.

Three days earlier, he’d been half-dead, concussed, and bleeding out in a pitch-black cell when my extraction team breached the compound. He never saw the face of the commander who kicked down his door — only a silhouette in the smoke, and the iron grip of a hand hauling him over her shoulder.

But he remembered one thing with crystal clarity: the sound of a jagged dog tag grinding against thick plastic ties, cutting him free, and the smell of ozone and blood as she carried him to the evac bird.

He’d woken in a military hospital in Germany thirty-six hours later, and signed himself out against medical advice the same afternoon. Three hundred guests.

A merger. A bride who’d made it clear that postponing was unthinkable.

So he’d flown eight time zones on his father’s jet, put on a tuxedo over the bruising, and walked to an altar two days after a cave.