Now that he was free, he knew that it was only a matter of time before his handler turned him loose inside America to exact his revenge.

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA

SIX MONTHS LATER

A crack of thunder shook the walls and the bedroom windows exploded in a hailstorm of broken glass. Powered completely by instinct, Scot Harvath reached for his girlfriend, Tracy, and rolled off the bed.

He landed hard on his bad shoulder. Shifting his weight, he reached up and yanked the drawer free of his nightstand. It came down with a crash. Foreign coins, a bottle of painkillers, a set of keys to locks he had yet to locate on the property, pens, and a pad of paper from the Ritz in Paris all spilled onto the wood floor.

Everything was there, except what he desperately needed to find-his gun.

Harvath rolled onto his stomach and breaststroked wildly beneath the bed. All he came up with was an empty box of hollow-point ammunition and an equally empty holster.

His instincts screamed at him to find a weapon while his conscience screamed at him for going to bed without one. But he had gone to bed with a weapon. He always did. He had placed it in the drawer right next to him. He was sure of it.

Maybe Tracy had gotten to it first. He turned to her, but she wasn’t there. In fact, in his groggy grab and roll, he wasn’t quite sure if she’d even been in the bed at all. Nothing was making sense.

Getting to his feet, Harvath stayed low and made for the hallway and the stairs at the far end. With every step, his trepidation mounted. His gut was trying to tell him something and on the final landing he then saw the blood. The floors, the walls, the ceiling…they were all covered with it.

There was so much of it everywhere. Where had it come from? Who had it come from?

Despite the adrenaline pumping through his body, his legs felt like two blocks of solid granite. It took all of his willpower to inch forward toward his entryway and the open front door.

When he stepped outside, what he saw came in quick, sharp stabs of vision-bloody brushstrokes painted above the doorway, an upturned picnic hamper, and collapsed upon the threshold next to a small white dog was the body of the woman he had been falling in love with.

Harvath thought he saw movement somewhere along the tree line at the edge of the property. He was looking for anything he could use as a weapon when a long, black knife swung over his shoulder from behind and the blade was pressed against his throat.

FAIRFAX HOSPITAL

FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA

Harvath’s head snapped back so suddenly that the shock startled him awake. It took several seconds for his heart rate to slow and for him to recognize where he was.

He looked around the hospital room and saw that everything was just as he’d left it before he’d drifted off to sleep. The bedrail he’d intended only to rest his forehead against was still there, as was the bed’s occupant, Tracy Hastings.

Harvath’s eyes scanned the length of her body, searching for any sign that she’d moved during his nap, but Tracy remained in her coma. She was the victim of an anonymous assassin’s bullet five days ago, and she hadn’t moved since; not even a fraction of an inch.

The ventilator continued its rhythmic cycle of woosh, pop…woosh, pop. Harvath couldn’t bear to see her like this. She had already suffered so many traumas. But the worst part was knowing that her current suffering was his fault.

In spite of what the world had thrown at her-in particular an IED in Iraq that had exploded in her face, taking one of her beautiful blue eyes and her career as a top Naval Explosive Ordinance Disposal tech-she had managed to maintain an incredible sense of humor. Though it had taken him a while to admit it, Harvath had fallen for Tracy the minute he first saw her.

They had been thrown together quite by accident just under a month ago in Manhattan. Harvath had traveled to the Big Apple to spend the Fourth of July weekend with his good friend, Robert Herrington. Robert, or “Bullet Bob” as he was known to his buddies, was a storied Delta Force operative who’d recently been medically discharged from the army due to an injury he’d suffered in Afghanistan.

Harvath and Herrington had a jam-packed weekend of drinking and carousing planned when New York City came under a horrific terrorist attack. Little did either of them know that Bob would be killed later that night.

With the island of Manhattan completely sealed off and police, fire, and EMS units stretched to the breaking point, Bob had helped Scot assemble his own team to hunt down the perpetrators.

The team was composed of special operations personnel from the Manhattan VA facility who, like Bob, had all been recently discharged for various injuries suffered overseas. Harvath had been standing on top of the VA building along the East River when Tracy and two other pals of Bob’s had stepped onto the roof.

At twenty-six, Tracy was ten years younger than Harvath, but there was a wisdom and worldliness about her that made their ages irrelevant. When Harvath later shared this observation with her, she joked that deactivating deadly explosive devices for a living had a way of aging a person, fast.

She might have carried herself like a woman older than her twenty-six years, but she certainly didn’t look it. She was the picture of fitness. In fact, she had the most sculpted body of any woman Harvath had ever known. Tracy joked she had a body to die for and a face to protect it. It was her way of dealing with the scarring she had suffered as a result of the IED detonation in Iraq. The plastic surgeons had done a fabulous job in matching the pale blue of her surviving eye to a replacement, but no matter how Tracy applied her makeup, she still couldn’t completely hide the thin facial scars.

None of that mattered to Harvath. He thought she was gorgeous. In particular, he loved how she wore her blond hair in pigtails. Pigtails were for little girls, but there was something decidedly sexy about them when worn by a woman.

That was Tracy in a nutshell. There was nothing ordinary about her. Her wit, her compassion, her persistence in the face of injury were all traits Harvath admired deeply, but those weren’t what had made him fall in love with her. His reason for falling in love was much more selfish.

The reason Harvath cared for her so deeply was that for the first time in his life, he’d found someone who truly understood him for who he was. She saw beyond the waves of constant wisecracks, through the never-ending stream of jokes, and over the pile of rocks that Harvath had stacked to wall himself off from the rest of the world. He didn’t need to play games with her and she didn’t need to play games with him. From the moment they met, they could each be themselves. It was a feeling Harvath had never thought he would experience.

As he looked down at Tracy in her hospital bed, he knew it was a feeling he would never experience again.

Gently, he untwined his hand from hers and stood.