Chapter 1
Harrison “Sarge” McEwan
Five Years Ago
* * *
The Navy SEALs trained you to within an inch of your life.
Almost everyone had heard of the twenty-four-week BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition and SEAL—training and the infamous Hell Week SEAL candidates went through to weed out anyone who couldn’t hack it.
But that was really only the beginning.
You still had months of training ahead of you before you officially earned your Trident: training in combat diving, land warfare, weapons, maritime operations, small unit tactics, demolitions, cold weather survival, parachute operations, and medical skills.
Only after that, oh yeah, and another full year of making sure you had all that information locked tightly in your head—training until all of it became muscle memory—did you become a SEAL.
I’d been in the Navy for the past seventeen years and a SEAL the past eleven. There wasn’t much someone could throw at me that I hadn’t been trained to handle.
But today’s circumstances were one of those things.
Standing down.
Any trained soldier, anyone with a warrior mindset, would tell you that the most difficult missions weren’t necessarily the ones where you looked death in the eye. The hardest ones were where you geared yourself up to do whatever needed to be done only for the mission to be canceled at the last minute.
That’s what had happened to my team today here in the middle of the Czech Republic.
We’d been seconds away from infiltrating a building—fully armed, prepared to kill—when we’d been told to stop. The hostage situation had been resolved through more diplomatic means.
We’d immediately backed out silently, no one aware we’d been there, especially since we weren’t officially supposed to be in the area at all. No lives lost, but the sudden reverse had left a shit-ton of adrenaline pumping through our systems.
After we’d debriefed, my team and I had been given some downtime to make up for the powers-that-be jerking our chains. Most of the guys had hit the bars. The liquor was cheap in Eastern Europe, and so were the women. They would spend their time drinking and fucking the frustration out of their systems.
Normally, I’d join the guys at the bar if only to babysit more than anything else. I was older than the majority of the team. Less rowdy. I made sure no one went too far off the deep end.
But today, I needed to be away from people, a chance to get out of my own head. No one was surprised by me going off on my own. I wasn’t exactly a people person.
We were in Prague, the canceled mission having been about a hundred miles south of here. The Navy had sent me all over the world, but this was a new location for me. I spent a few hours walking around the tourist trap areas of the city, then as the sun set, I found myself off the beaten path. The buildings weren’t quite as clean here, the electricity a little more sketchy.
Another good thing about being a Navy SEAL was your training gave you confidence to go where most tourists wouldn’t want to venture. I was pretty far from Pražský hrad—Prague’s famous castle—or the Charles Bridge, another favorite of travelers.
And while I wasn’t worried about handling any trouble if it came my way, I wasn’t trying to attract it either. I kept my head down so it looked as if my eyes were on the ground, although I still took in everything going on around me.
And that was when I saw her.
A girl, she had to be a teenager, sitting on the lowest windowsill of an old house, reading a ratty paperback as night fell on the city. The book was falling apart in her hands, kept together only by her grasp on it. I would have walked by without giving her much thought if it weren’t for that book.
I wondered what she was reading the way only someone who loved books could do. I didn’t see a lot of young people reading paperbacks anymore—which made me feel so fucking old—they tended to be too plugged into electronic devices. So seeing her gave me a little hope that I wasn’t completely over the hill yet.
I had barely passed by on the other side of the street when I heard her cry out. I spun out of instinct to find two men had joined her—one older, one younger. One of them had thrown her to the ground from her perch.
She got back up, pieces of paperback clutched in her hands, and said something to the men I couldn’t hear. The younger guy, maybe in his mid-twenties, backhanded her.
All the adrenaline I had spent the past few hours attempting to get rid of came rushing back as her face jerked to the side.
This was not my problem, not my business. I knew that going over to help her could make the situation worse in the long run.
I had learned that growing up on our farm in Iowa when I’d found a butterfly attempting to make it out of its chrysalis. It had been struggling so hard I’d decided to help it and cut the outer shell just a little with my pocketknife.
But in the end, my help meant the butterfly didn’t develop the muscles needed to survive once it was out. The butterfly had died because its wings were too weak to fly.
Helping this girl now might save her from a beating, but could very likely cause bigger problems for her now or in the future, which was the last thing I wanted to do.
But when the young man hit her again and she fell to the ground, paperback flying, my legs started moving on their own, walking toward the trouble. I could take out both men, permanently, but that would cause more problems also—international problems.
I knew the second they saw me. All three of them froze.
It was my size. I knew how to downplay both my status as an American and my size at six foot three and two hundred twenty pounds of muscle. But right now, I wasn’t trying to downplay anything.
By the time I crossed the street, the two men had turned and walked away, the young one giving the girl one last glare. I stopped before I reached her, watching as she got off the ground and picked up the pieces of her book.
Her eyes, the clearest fucking blue I’d ever seen, met mine. Her brown hair fell around her shoulder as she wiped a little bit of blood from the corner of her mouth.
I didn’t say anything. I doubted she spoke English. I just nodded and then turned back the way I’d come, hoping I hadn’t made her life worse.
“Thank you.”
I could have sworn I heard the words as I turned away, but I didn’t look back. It was better for her if I left her completely alone.
I forced myself to walk back toward the touristy part of town and grab a bite to eat. That was better than the plan I wanted to pursue—tracking down those assholes and teaching them what it was like to get a hit by someone bigger than them.
Not my problem. I had to say it almost as a mantra as I walked.
I nursed a watered-down beer as I read my own paperback at an outdoor table facing the Charles Bridge a couple hours later when I blinked and did a double take.
It was the girl again.
She looked different. Her brown hair was pulled to the side over her face, covering those distinctive blue eyes. Her makeup and posture were different too—she was making sure not to draw attention to herself.
I took a sip of beer and watched.
She almost seemed to be lost, walking a little bit in one direction, then turning in the other, not making eye contact with anyone or trying to interact with them. But when she passed by one couple a little too closely, I realized what she was doing.