Chapter 1 - THE GHOST FROM THE GRAVEThe glow of the smartphone screen illuminated the dark subterranean war room, casting cold blue shadows across my face.
He knows Jake survived.
The words echoed in my mind, displacing the white-hot fury that had driven me just moments before. Rage is a clean tool. It has a target, a vector, and an expiration date. But suspicion? Suspicion is a poison that seeps into the foundations of everything you have built.
I zoomed in on the photograph.
The pixels sharpened. It was definitely yesterday—the specific brand of tactical winter coat I wore was only released a week ago. But the man standing behind Rebecca and the newborn infant was unmistakably Viktor Vance.
My former mentor. My former brother-in-arms. The man I had personally executed with a double-tap to the chest and buried beneath four feet of concrete in a disused silo outside Prague fifteen years ago.
"Boss?"
The low, gravelly voice broke the silence. Marcus, my second-in-command and the man who had overseen my logistics network for two decades, stepped back into the room. He had cleared the thirty-two operatives out when I gave the order, but the look in my eyes must have told him the situation had mutated into something far more dangerous.
"Cancel the immediate hit on the seventeen," I said, my voice dangerously calm.
Marcus blinked, his tactical training momentarily failing him as shock crossed his scarred features. "Cancel? Sir, they put your son in intensive care. Seventeen minutes of footage—"
"The seventeen are a distraction, Marcus," I interrupted, spinning the phone around to show him the screen. "Look at the background."
Marcus leaned in. His eyes scanned the image, moving past Rebecca, past the infant Jake, and landing on the figure standing in the shadows. The color drained completely from Marcus’s face. His breath hitched.
"Holy mother of God..." Marcus whispered. "That's... that's Viktor."
"He was dead, Marcus. I watched his heart stop."
"Then who the hell is running around wearing his face, or worse—how did he survive?" Marcus muttered, his hand instinctively dropping to the grip of his sidearm. "And what does he want with Jake?"
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed again. A live video feed.
I tapped it open.
The screen showed a sterile, high-security hospital room. My son, Jake, lay motionless on the bed, wires and tubes spider-webbing across his bruised and bandaged body. Standing over him, adjusting the IV drip, was a nurse wearing a surgical mask.
Then, the nurse looked straight into the security camera lens, pulled down the mask, and smiled.
It wasn't a nurse. It was a man with a jagged, familiar scar running from his jawline up to his left ear—a souvenir from a knife fight we had shared in the mountains of Chechnya twenty years ago.
May you like
Dmitri. Viktor’s most loyal executioner.
And he was holding a scalpel directly over Jake's throat.
