Etienne Pagnon had been a warrior before he was a drunkard. Being Canadian and around before the events that formed JTF–2, the modern Canadian Special Forces, he had first been recruited into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Special Emergency Response Team. Etienne had been a sniper and that was not good for a man who had begun imbibing strong liquor. Released from duty, he’d spelled for a tour with the Légion étrangère, but had found his tastes more suited to that of a freelance mercenary. He had been in demand as a sniper but his desire for alcohol let him and his sponsors down. Having nowhere to turn but to crime, he’d embraced his new profession, working for a succession of low-life gangsters, first in Canada, then Seattle. Burned out and feeling the daily shakes, he drifted south to Oregon where he’d hooked up with Luke’s mother. He was a shadow of his former self, but he had much to share with his willing student.

From Etienne, Luke learned everything about stalking and killing men. He also earned a secondary education: Etienne showed him that women were below them and were things to be used and abused. At thirteen Luke took his first woman, paid for by Etienne, and Etienne had made sure that the woman earned every cent. She was the first person Luke killed.

Luke was a good apprentice. His surrogate father wasn’t always the best teacher; his way of insuring that the growing boy learned his lessons well was to beat the ideas into him. Always afterward he would hug the boy and tell him he was proud of him. The beatings were a necessary evil, he said; they would make the boy into a strong man. Luke took the licks until he was eighteen years old. Then Etienne wasn’t capable of hurting him anymore. When he was drunk and Luke sober, he’d struck at the younger man’s face. Luke caught the man’s chin in the crook of his elbow, gripped his opposite bicep and placed a hand to the back of Etienne’s head. He constricted the life from the man, while remembering that patch of pale wooden floor in the cabin ten years earlier. Luke hated women, he’d hated the bitch that had birthed him, but when it came down to it, Etienne had it coming.

Luke struck out on his own. Taking his original father’s surname, he’d offered his services to the highest bidders. For eighteen years he’d been in the trade. He’d earned his house overlooking the ocean, riches that a mountain boy could never have imagined, and a wife who was his very own slave. Until that bitch had betrayed him and he’d been forced to leave his dream behind.