Chapter 2
COLTON STRYKER
Eyes crack open to fluorescent hell. The lights hanging from Kane's warehouse ceiling burn through my skull like white phosphorus, each pulse of my heartbeat a hammer against bone.
My tongue feels like sandpaper soaked in battery acid, and every breath tastes of rust and regret.
The familiar taste of shame and Jack Daniel's coats my mouth—morning's first reminder that I'm still breathing when better men aren't.
The cot beneath me is military surplus, thin mattress over a metal frame.
Same kind we used in Kandahar, the same kind I've woken up on in a dozen different countries where nobody cared whether you lived or died.
My body knows the feel, even through the haze of whatever the hell I drank last night.
Everything hurts. Ribs from where Brennan's boys worked me over during that disaster in Whitefish.
Knuckles from fighting back, though I can barely remember connecting.
But mostly it's the poison in my blood, alcohol withdrawal starting its familiar dance with trembling fingers and cold sweats.
I push up slowly, vertebrae popping like rifle shots.
The world tilts, steadies, tilts again like I'm on the deck of a ship in rough seas.
My hands shake as I plant them on my knees, scarred knuckles white with the effort of staying upright.
The warehouse spreads out before me in painful clarity, each detail sharp enough to cut.
Kane's built himself a fortress.
Weapons racks line the north wall—rifles, sidearms, enough ordnance to outfit a platoon.
Everything clean, organized by caliber and purpose.
The kind of methodical arrangement that keeps a man sane when the world's trying to kill him.
Surveillance monitors glow along another wall, showing multiple angles of approach.
No blind spots. Smart positioning. The man always was thorough.
Tactical maps cover an operational planning table like a military war room.
Montana. Wyoming. Routes marked in different colors—red for primary escape routes, blue for supply runs, yellow for dead drops.
Fallback positions. Supply caches. The work of a man who's accepted that running is just tactical repositioning.
Above it all, a whiteboard covered in names, some crossed out in red marker, others circled in blue. A war room for battles that never end.
My throat feels like I've been gargling gravel for a week. When did I last have water that wasn't mixed with whiskey? The question hangs in my mind, unanswered because I genuinely can't remember.
"Coffee."
Kane sets a mug beside me, the ceramic warm against the metal table.
Steam rises, bitter and black as my current outlook on life.
No sugar, no cream, no mercy. Exactly what I need.
He pulls out a chair, sits across from me with his own mug, movements careful and deliberate.
His eyes are steady, assessing. Not judging—Kane's never been one for that—but measuring.
Seeing if there's anything left worth salvaging from the wreckage I've made of myself.
"Mosul makes us even." His voice is quiet, matter-of-fact. "What you did in Kinshasa—executing that Belgian bastard for using kids—that's something else entirely."
The coffee burns going down like liquid fire.
Good. I need the pain, the heat, something real to focus on besides the memory of Van Der Berg's eyes when I put the Sig against his temple.
Surprised. Like he couldn't believe someone would actually hold him accountable for the children in his cobalt mines.
Like he thought money could wash the blood off his hands.
"Should've walked away," I manage, voice like I've been eating glass and asking for seconds.
"But you didn't." Kane leans back, still watching me with those calculating eyes. "You could have taken the extraction fee. Two hundred grand for looking the other way while he relocated to another operation. Instead, you painted his office with his brains and executed his entire security detail."
"They knew." The words come out flat, emotionless. "Every one of them knew about the kids. Stood guard while eight-year-olds dug cobalt sixteen hours a day. Beat them when they slowed down. Fed them just enough to keep them working."
"That's my point." Kane's fingers drum once on the table, then still.
Military discipline. "You put a bullet in him because it was right. Not smart, not profitable, but right. That's the kind of man I need." His tone doesn’t rise, doesn’t harden. He speaks like he’s briefing a mission—steady, disciplined, no wasted words.
My throat closes. The coffee mug trembles in my grip like a leaf in a hurricane, and I set it down before Kane sees. He's already seen enough. The drunk who got sloppy in Whitefish. The operator who chose dead kids over a clean extraction. The fool who calculates righteousness matters in our world.
"I got Collins killed in Kinshasa," I say, the words tasting like ashes. "My spotter. Twenty-six years old. Had a girl back home. Was saving up for a ring."
"Collins knew the job."
"He didn't know I'd go off script. Didn't know his team leader was the kind of asshole who'd throw away the mission for a principle."
"He knew you." Kane's voice doesn't change, but something in his eyes does. Understanding, maybe. Or recognition. The look of one soldier seeing another. "Same as I knew you in Mosul. Same as you knew me when the chips were down."
The warehouse door clangs open, metal on metal, sharp enough to make me reach for a weapon that isn't there. My hand finds empty air where the Glock should be, muscle memory faster than conscious thought. Even half-drunk and poisoned with guilt, the reflexes are still there.
She enters like winter itself.
Victoria Cross. Not the British equivalent of the Medal of Honor, but a force to be reckoned with.
I recognize her from the files, the rumors, the warnings whispered in safe houses from Beirut to Bangkok.
Her silver hair was sculpted into a style that likely cost more than most cars, and the coat draped over her shoulders could have paid a year’s salary for the average person.
But it's her eyes that mark her as a predator—calculating, cold, cataloging everything in the warehouse including the exits, the weapons, and the two broken operators sitting at a planning table.
Her gaze lands on me, takes in the shaking hands, the three-day stubble, the blood under my fingernails from whatever fight I'd gotten into before Kane dragged me here.
Then Kane, his tactical calm, his readiness.
She's measuring us both, running calculations on our usefulness versus our liability.
In her world, everything has a price and everyone has an expiration date.
"Gentlemen." Her voice carries that particular authority that comes from knowing where bodies are buried. Probably because she buried half of them herself.
She moves to Kane's operational planning table with deliberate grace, designer heels somehow silent on the concrete floor.
From an expensive Italian leather portfolio, she produces photographs.
Black and white. Surveillance quality. She spreads them across the table with manicured fingers, each movement precise as a dealer laying out cards in a game where the stakes are measured in lives.
Cross doesn’t say it out loud, but the message is clear: if we’re going to keep breathing, we’ll be hearing from her again. Not in person, not with a business card. The kind of contact that arrives on a dark screen with a tag that simply reads CROSS.
Tommy’s tablet blinks twice. He angles it my way: last-known trace routes through a Brussels diplomatic enclave.
The burner chain is clean, too clean. Redacted employment records line up with intelligence tasking windows.
Not proof—but enough to keep listening, enough to remind us she plays on a board above ours.
Forty-three faces stare up at us.
I know that number because I count them twice, my brain trying to process what I'm seeing through the fog of withdrawal and disbelief.
Operators. All of them. Dead. All of them.
Professionals who'd survived wars, revolutions, and betrayals only to end up as eight-by-ten glossies on a warehouse table.
"Marcus Reid," she says, tapping one photo with a fingernail painted the color of dried blood.
"Shot through his hotel window in Crete.
Single round, .338 Lapua, eight hundred meters.
Professional work." She moves to the next.
"Daniel Lockwood, car bomb in Beirut. Remote detonated.
Clean blast pattern, minimal collateral damage.
" Another photo. "James Chen, supposed suicide in Tokyo that forensics would dispute if anyone cared to look.
Hanging, but the ligature marks are wrong. Staged."
My stomach turns to ice water as I recognize more faces.
Rodriguez, who ran overwatch in Fallujah and saved my ass three different times.
Petrov, who shared his vodka during a bitter Chechen winter.
Williams, who gave me his last MRE in some Colombian jungle whose name I never learned and whose heat tried to kill us all.
"Systematic elimination." Cross's voice remains clinically detached, like she's discussing quarterly earnings instead of murdered men who bled for their countries. "Professional work. Someone with resources, intelligence, and very specific targeting criteria."
"Burned operators," Kane says with deliberate precision, his voice carrying the weight of understanding.
"Precisely. Every one of them disavowed, abandoned, or betrayed by their handlers." She slides another file across the table with one finger, the movement elegant and deadly. "Which brings us to this."