"At 5:56 on a freezing Monday morning, my husband came home after spending the night with my own sister and found my wedding ring waiting on his pillow instead of me.

Adrian Callahan stood on the open skid of the helicopter before it had even touched the ground, five feet above the rocky bluff, his fingers locked into a ceiling harness.

He wore a dark tactical rig over his black wool sweater, a short-barreled carbine slung across his chest. His hair was plastered to his forehead by the downwash, his face stripped of every trace of humanity—a mask of pure, unadulterated lethal purpose.

Beside him, two Aegis operators leaped onto the shale, their suppressed rifles raised and firing before their boots had even found traction in the mud.

*Pfft. Pfft.*

The contractor standing behind the pale-faced man dropped instantly, two rounds punching through the chest of his hunting coat, his body rolling limp down the embankment toward the freezing grey water of the Hudson.

The pale-faced man didn't hesitate. He dropped the syringe and reached for his sidearm, using Norah’s prostrate form as a human shield.

"Callahan!" he screamed above the deafening shriek of the rotors. "Step back or she takes a round to the—"

He never finished the sentence.

Adrian didn't wait for his men. He didn't issue an order. He closed the ten-foot distance between them in a blur of violent motion, his combat boot slamming into the man’s extended wrist with a sickening crunch of fracturing bone. The pistol flew spinning into the river.

In the same fluid arc, Adrian seized the man by the throat, driving him backward into the stone foundation of the cottage with enough force to crack the mortar.

"Who commissioned you?" Adrian roared, his face an inch from the man’s eyes, his forearm crushing the operative’s windpipe against the stone.

The man gagged, blood bubbling between his teeth, but his eyes held a terrifying, fanatical amusement. "Mercer... sends his... congratulations... on the heir, Adrian."

Adrian didn't ask another question. He drew his combat knife and drove the pommel into the man’s temple, dropping him unconscious into the mud.

The woods fell suddenly silent, save for the thumping idle of the Black Hawk hovering twenty yards out over the water, its downwash flattening the marsh grass.

Adrian turned.

Norah lay on her side in the wet mud, her hands curled tightly over the massive swell of her stomach, her coat torn and covered in grey shale. She was shivering uncontrollably, her face pale as parchment, her lips tinged with a faint, terrifying shade of blue.

Adrian dropped his weapon into the dirt.

He fell to his knees in the slush beside her, his gloved hands hovering over her shoulders, shaking with a terror that a decade of warfare had never taught him.

"Norah," he choked out, his voice breaking into pieces. "Norah, don't look at them. Look at me. Look at my face."

He reached to pull her into his chest, but the moment his fingers brushed the wool of her coat, Norah recoiled as if burned by fire.

"Don't touch me," she gasped, her voice ragged, her chest heaving with shallow, panicked breaths. She tried to push herself backward through the mud, away from him, her eyes wide and wild with a mixture of shock and agonizing betrayal. "Don't you dare touch me."

"Norah, you're in shock, you're hypothermic—"

"I saw Brooke!" she screamed, the sound tearing out of her lungs, raw and bleeding into the freezing mountain air. "I know what you did! I know what you are!"

Adrian did not pull back. He leaned over her, using his broad shoulders to shield her trembling body from the freezing wind whipped up by the helicopter blades.

"Brooke was used," he said, his voice deep, vibrating with an urgent, desperate intensity that pinned her eyes to his. "I was drugged, Norah. They tested my blood an hour ago. Synthetic paralytics. Julian Mercer orchestrated the entire night to force you out of the house because he couldn't touch you behind my security."

Norah stared at him, her chest rising and falling violently. "You lie. You always have a protocol... you always have an excuse..."

"Look at me!" Adrian demanded, ripping off his tactical gloves and pressing his bare, warm hands against her freezing cheeks. "Look at my eyes, Norah! Have I ever lied to you about our family? Have I ever broken a vow to our child?"

Norah’s breath hitched. She looked into his grey eyes—the eyes that had wept beside her hospital bed in Zurich, the eyes that had watched over her during five months of absolute bed rest.

They were bloodshot, rimmed with red, and filled with a raw, agonizing terror that no man on earth could fabricate.

Then, a sudden, blinding spasm of pain ripped through her pelvis, far worse than anything she had felt before.

Norah’s head snapped back against the mud with a strangled shriek of agony. Her hands dug into the slush, her fingers clawing at the earth as her body locked into a massive, violent contraction.