It was the night rages that had finished off his relationship with Aimee, sending her fleeing from their room in fear for her safety; that and his dangerous assignments all around the world. Alex and Aimee had travelled to the depths of the Antarctic together, seen wonders hidden for a thousand millennia, lost friends, colleagues and good soldiers, and barely survived being pursued by an ancient monster beneath the ice. Afterwards, they had tried real hard to make it work, but in the end Aimee had left him.

Alex remembered all too well the night, a year or so ago, when he and Aimee had gone for a pre-dinner drink at a little bar in Milwaukee. A football team on a stag night had been in the bar too, and when Alex returned from the restroom he had seen Aimee slap the face of one large brute as he tried to squeeze her breast. Fifteen minutes later, Aimee had called Major Hammerson requesting urgent assistance – for the footballers. A lot of big men had got badly hurt that night, some permanently. It had cost the military a lot in hush money, and the guilt still hung over Alex’s head like a dark thundercloud.

The problem was that Alex had enjoyed the destruction – once he started, he couldn’t stop. He’d wanted to hurt those guys; more, he’d wanted to kill them. And the release had felt good.

He still thought of Aimee, her dark hair and fair skin, the quick temper that made her blue eyes go hard as ice chips, then soften and darken to a deep ocean blue when she kissed him. He wondered whether she was fully recovered from the Antarctic expedition and her own nightmares. He also wondered whether she still thought about him, whether she was really over their time together. He didn’t blame her for leaving. It was the best thing she could have done for both of them. He couldn’t contemplate what he would have inflicted on himself if he had ever hurt her.

He remembered her face after the fight in the bar – the look of horror and disbelief on those beautiful features. She was terrified – not of the men who had assaulted her, but of him. ‘Jack Hammerson’s Frankenstein monster’ she had called him in a moment of anguish and confusion. She had tried to laugh about it later, but from then on, deep in her eyes, he’d seen tension and wariness.

She was right: he was a monster. A monster created by an accident on a battlefield on the other side of the planet. She had begged him to seek medical opinions from specialists outside of the military, but he couldn’t even do that for her. Hammerson had said no. Aimee had exploded when Alex tried to explain. She didn’t believe his reasons and wouldn’t listen to him after that.