I stepped off a classified military transport and made my way straight to the ICU, where my wife lay with twenty-seven broken b0nes and a fractured skull.

"Contact!" Master Sergeant Cole roared from the hallway.

Gunfire ripped through the corridor outside—not the sporadic shooting of local street thugs, but the rhythmic, disciplined three-round bursts of professional military contractors using suppressed carbines.

"Evans! Get the manual resuscitators!" I bellowed in the dark.

I whipped out my tactical penlight, clicking it on to reveal Evans and two nurses diving behind the steel medical carts as rounds punched clean through the drywall, showering the room in white plaster dust.

"Cole!" I yelled into my radio headset.

"They cut the mains and sabotaged the backup diesel generators in the sub-basement!" Cole’s voice came back, accompanied by the deafening roar of an unsuppressed M4 carbine answering the attackers. "Six hostiles moving down the north stairwell! Full body armor, night vision goggles! They’re not cops, Captain! These are Blackwater-tier guns!"

I leaned over Rosalie. Her eyes were wide, filled with raw panic, but I looked into them with the absolute calm of a commander under fire.

"Rosie. Look at me," I commanded softly.

She met my eyes.

"I promised you when I put this ring on your finger that nothing in this world would ever hurt you while I had breath in my lungs. I meant it."

I pulled the spare Glock 19 from my tactical rig, chambered a round, and handed it to Dr. Evans, who was trembling beneath the window. "You know how to use this?"

"I... I served two years in the reserves," Evans stammered, taking the weapon.

"Anyone comes through that door without a blue IR strobe on their helmet, empty the magazine into their chest," I said. "Protect my wife."

"Yes, sir!"

I drew my customized combat .45, clicked on my own night-vision monocular, and stepped through the doorway into the pitch-black corridor.

The hallway was filled with thick, pungent smoke from flashbang grenades. Through the green glow of my night-vision lens, I saw two operators in dark tactical gear moving in a stack toward Rosalie’s room, their weapon-mounted lasers slicing through the haze.

One of them raised his rifle to breach the room.

I didn't shout a warning.

I fired twice. The heavy .45 rounds caught the first contractor directly in the side of his neck above the armor plate. He collapsed instantly, his rifle clattering to the floor.

The second shooter spun toward me, bringing his barrel up, but I closed the distance in two strides, slapped his barrel aside with my left forearm, and drove the heel of my boot into his knee joint. The joint snapped with a wet crunch. As he dropped, I pressed the muzzle under his chin and pulled the trigger.

Down the hallway, Cole and his two Delta operators finished sweeping the elevator lobby, leaving three more masked attackers motionless on the blood-slicked tiles.

Cole rounded the corner, his weapon raised, the blue IR beacon pulsing silently on his helmet. "Corridor clear! Rooftop team neutralised two snipers! How’s Mrs. Sinclair?!"

"She’s alive," I breathed, lowering my sidearm.

I knelt beside the leader of the contractor team, ripped off his balaclava, and pulled his tactical radio from his vest.

A voice squawked through the earpiece.

"Team leader, report. Is the package terminated? We have Mrs. Miller waiting for confirmation at the gala."

I pressed the transmit button.

"Brad," I said.

A dead silence fell over the radio line.

"Brad, this is Captain Alexander Sinclair," I said, my voice echoing down the ruined hospital hall. "Your five-hundred-thousand-dollar hit squad lasted ninety seconds. My wife is breathing. And I am coming for your party."

"Sinclair—" Brad Vance’s voice shook through the radio. "Listen to me, Sinclair, you don't know what you’re—"

I crushed the radio beneath the heel of my boot, turned to Cole, and racked the slide of my weapon.

"Cole, get the medevac chopper on the roof. Move Rosalie directly to the naval hospital at Fort Moore under armed Delta guard. Don't leave her side."

"Where are you going, Captain?" Cole asked.

I looked out the shattered window toward the glowing skyline of Atlanta in the distance.