I’d bought that necklace at twenty-two. Before Iraq. Before prison. Before everything fell apart. I bought it for Julia Mercer, the only woman who ever made me believe I could outrun the darkness I was born into.
My hands started shaking.
The girl’s eyes fluttered open, and for a split second she looked straight at me—not with Julia’s green eyes, but something colder.
Gray.
The same gray I saw in the mirror every morning.
“What’s your name?” I asked, my voice breaking.
“Lily,” she whispered. “I’m seven.”
Seven.
I’d deployed nine months before she would’ve been born.
Julia had vanished while pregnant, buried beneath silence and a restraining order that never made sense—until now.
And suddenly, I knew.
I knew who did this.
Because the man Julia feared—the man she’d been involved with before me—was the same man who beat my mother to death in 1991 while I hid under the stairs, listening to her beg.
Harold Pike.
He was back.
And he had my daughter.
“Ethan!” I roared. “Keep her alive. If she goes down, you go down.”
Ethan didn’t flinch, already wrapping a thermal blanket around Lily’s shoulders. “She’s hypothermic and in shock, Jax. We need a hospital.”