Beschrijving

He never lost a principal. But he lost the one man he swore to bring home. Seven years ago, Declan O’Rourke knelt in the warm rain of a jungle that wasn’t supposed to be an ambush. He packed a wound that had already bled out. He carried Corrigan’s body to the bird. And he buried the question that still wakes him at three in the morning: why didn’t you check the intel? Now he runs a security firm in Port Sterling and keeps strangers alive for a living. Then a manila folder lands on his desk with a name that hits like a tracer round. Sasha Petrov. Biotech heir. Newly orphaned. Sitting alone in the front row of her father’s funeral, too composed to cry. Her father built a non-addictive painkiller that could change the world. Now a man named Mackenzie Hartley wants the patent badly enough to kill for it. One staged car crash. One break-in that left a guard with a permanent tremor. Two attempts. Both meant to look like accidents. Declan’s job is simple: protect the principal, neutralize the threat, close the file. He’s done it a hundred times. He’s never done it for a woman who watches the shadows the same way he does. But the deeper he digs, the less the story holds. A faked death. A stolen identity. A sleeper who has been close all along. And the closer he gets to Sasha, the higher the cost of failing her becomes. Then the lie wins, in public, in front of the shareholders who hold her company in their hands. \