"One man, haunted by old injuries and darker secrets, forced into action when corruption pushes too far."
The rain came down in sheets that night, turning the mountain road into a river of mud and memory. Elias Vance sat in his truck at the edge of the overlook, watching the lights of the valley below blur and shift through the windshield. Three months since he'd last been down there. Three months since everything went to hell.
His phone buzzed on the dashboard—the same unknown number that had been calling for the past week. He let it go to voicemail again. Some things were better left unanswered, especially when you'd spent the last fifteen years making sure your past stayed buried.
But the past, Elias had learned, had a way of clawing its way back to the surface.
The message light blinked red in the darkness. Against his better judgment, he picked up the phone.
"Vance, I know you're there. I know you can hear this. They took Sarah tonight. If you ever gave a damn about anything other than hiding in those mountains, you'll call me back."
The phone slipped from his fingers.
Sarah.
He hadn't heard that name spoken aloud in three years. Hadn't let himself think it in two. But hearing it now, crackling through the cheap speaker of a burner phone on a rain-soaked night, brought everything flooding back—the job in Caracas, the blown extraction, the choice he'd made that saved a dozen lives and cost him everything that mattered.
Elias closed his eyes and felt the familiar ache in his shoulder where the bullet had torn through muscle and bone. Some wounds healed. Others just learned to live with you.
[Chapter continues...]