For Luke — Trust No One

The call came at 10:03 p.m., ninety-three days after I signed the papers that ended my marriage to save the woman I loved from a war she didn't know she'd married into.

My name is Luke Mercer. I run Mercer Holdings, a private security and logistics firm that does work for people who don't like their names appearing anywhere. Before that, I ran black operations out of a base nobody officially acknowledges. I learned young that the people who hurt you rarely wear a uniform that announces it.

Ninety-three days earlier, I had looked into Elena Ross's eyes across our kitchen island and told her I didn't love her anymore. It was the single greatest lie I have ever told, and I trained for a decade to become someone who could lie without his pulse changing. I told that lie because two weeks before, a man named Dominic Vale, my late father's business partner and the closest thing I had to an uncle, had sat across from me in a steakhouse and explained, very calmly, that if I didn't end my marriage, Elena would end up in a hospital, or worse, and it would look like an accident. He had photos. Her morning runs. Her grocery store. Her yoga class on Tuesdays. He didn't need to say more.

So I signed the papers. I moved out. I let her hate me, because a woman who hates you doesn't call you, and a woman who doesn't call you can't be traced back to you. I thought I was building a wall around her.

I had no idea I was locking her inside it with the wolf.

My phone lit up my dark penthouse over Tribeca like a flare. A nurse's voice, clipped and urgent. "Mr. Mercer? This is St. Catherine's Medical Center. Your ex-wife, Elena Ross, was admitted twenty minutes ago. She's unconscious. Our exam indicates she's approximately sixteen weeks pregnant."

I did not breathe for several seconds.

Pregnant. Unconscious. Ex-wife.

Every wall I had spent three months constructing came down in the space of one sentence. I called Marco Reyes, my driver and head of security, a man who had pulled me out of two different countries under fire and never once raised his voice doing it. He had the SUV at my door in four minutes. I didn't say a word getting in. The man Elena had married was gone the day I signed those papers. The man in that car was the version of me that had once made men twice my size go quiet with a single look, and that version had just woken up.

St. Catherine's smelled like every hospital smells, disinfectant and old coffee and fear that's gone stale from sitting too long in the same waiting room. Marco stayed a step behind me, his hand resting near the concealed weapon under his jacket, an old habit that fifteen years of retirement from active operations had never fully switched off in either of us.