Had felt the crunch, and smelled the blood.

The van lurched, knocking him off balance, and a sap struck his ribs, landing blow after pummeling blow.

He swiveled, hooked a leg over a shoulder, locked thighs around a ropy neck.

The van peeled around a corner.

He took the neck with him into the side panel.

More bullets hit. Anna’s screams drowned out everything else.

They beat him until he let go, and then they grabbed her by the hair and stuffed a rag in her mouth. He inched in her direction, and they boot stomped him every time. The van braked to a hard stop soon after, and they hauled him away, and her muffled screams went silent.

He never did have a chance to talk to her or apologize or explain.

He wasn’t sure what they’d done with her—assumed she was in a room similar to this—knew she was hurt and scared, and for that, the fault was all his.

He’d counted on professionals, not goddamn sadists.

That miscalculation raised the possibility of others and dredged the murky subconscious depths, churning up self-loathing and fear. He’d factored for exponential possibilities, but he could never know what he didn’t know. There’d always been a chance that the Russians, with their enormous network of spies, were three steps ahead of him. There was still the chance these weren’t Russians at all.

That final thought pushed self-loathing into anger.

He shoved Clare out of his head, same as he’d been shoving her for the past ten years, and his focus homed in on the patter of soles against tile, and tracked footsteps from the wall at his left across the floor.

Minutia in movement betrayed breathing behind his back.

In his mind’s eye he saw the man whose neck he’d locked onto, face not far from his, staring at his head.

Seconds dragged on like minutes.

A metal tip pressed through the pillowcase, against his throat, and a ragged voice whispered, “When is end, you pay. Urvan does not forget.”

Jack pressed against the knife, fast enough, deep enough for the point to draw blood. The blade jerked away.

Urvan hissed, “Psikh yebanutyi.”

There were a handful of ways to interpret that.

Psycho motherfucker was what the guy had meant.

Mocking laughter followed.

Urvan returned to where he’d started, and silence settled, and pain at Jack’s throat joined pain in his head and the burn of stiffening muscles and a thirst that had started with the fight and had only grown more intense since, comforting discomfort in the way so much of the hell from his childhood was comforting, because pain was familiar and he understood what was familiar and he’d been here before—a dozen times in a dozen places—interrogated, sleep deprived, beaten, starved, until reality turned inside out and his own mind betrayed him.