With his dad’s words echoing in his mind, Sam hunched over the sink of his motel room and cupped the water running from the tap with his right hand. He splashed it against his face, the chill a welcome feeling against the humidity of the heat. His left wrist was throbbing, the freshness of the fracture causing him to reach for the painkillers and throw two back.

It had been a hell of a few days and it was starting to catch-up with him.

His eyebrow, freshly stitched, had an accompanying bruise and his ribs ached from the clubbing blow from Sykes.

But the pain was bearable.

Sam had been through worse.

Much worse.

With his shirt lying on the bed of the motel room, he gazed over his naked torso in the mirror. It was an impressive memorial to the battles he’d been in. The scarring down his left side from the bomb blast that sent him spiralling down a cliff face a decade ago. The knife wound from his fight with one of the Mitchell Brothers on his quest to bring down Frank Jackson. The fresh scar down his spine as he fought The Hangman of Baghdad to the death. The bullet wounds that Mac had sent through his shoulder and his stomach, that should have killed him.

But they hadn’t because Alex had saved his life.

Sam should have been dead by now, but Alex had pulled him from death’s grip with both hands and kept him alive long enough to bring down Wallace. To bring down Chapman.

If she hadn’t been there, who knows the damage those men would be doing. And now, she was moments away from being involved in a dangerous deal with a DEA agent who had dangled her family in front of her like a carrot.

‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Son.’

Those words rattled around Sam’s mind like a painful pinball. Sam had always strived to honour his father’s legacy through every avenue of his life. From his exceptional career within the military, to his devotion to his own family.

But he’d failed to live up to that particular request.

He’d promised his son he would stop killing.

Since then, dozens of people had been put in the ground by Sam’s hand.

He’d promised to keep his family safe.

Jamie was dead, and Lucy had removed herself from Sam’s life.

Sam stared at himself in the mirror, knowing that despite the path he’d chosen, he wasn’t a bad man. He’d broken the law, putting himself into legend with his war on crime. But along the way, he’d lost too many people for it to have been worth it.

Sam had done a lot of wrong things for the right reason.