Laurel Everlane was good at her job. It was her entire world. At thirty, getting recruited into the CIA’s Special Operations Group was the singular achievement of her life. She’d given up everything to be there, friendships, romantic relationships, the chance to start a family.

She’d given up who she was, her very identity.

And this was the pay off, this corner section of the sixth floor of the CIA’s new headquarters building at Langley.

The space was considered prime real estate. Its large windows overlooked a leafy section of the Potomac River and the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

She sat at the conference room table, her papers and pen arranged neatly in front of her, and gazed across the office.

He was late. He was always late.

The group was small, but punched above its weight in terms of authority and access. The bigwigs in congress rarely said no to them. Its field agents, known officially as Paramilitary Operatives, but within the group as assets, were secretly acknowledged to be the most elite units in the nation. They were recruited exclusively from Navy’s SEAL Team Six, Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron, Marine Corps’ MARSOC, and Army’s Delta Force.

It was a team that actually did something, struck back at the enemy, hit them where it hurt, and that was what Laurel liked about it.

She was a girl with an ax to grind.

When she was sixteen, she’d appeared in a music video for a local rapper dressed in a bikini and holding a machine gun. At her insistence, the video ended up including footage of her shooting the gun at targets with the faces of all the men on the Bush Administration’s card deck of most wanted terrorists.

She meant business.

She grew up in Dale County, Alabama within sight of Fort Rucker. She’d been an only child and her mother died during childbirth. Her father died when she was fourteen. He was an army colonel, killed at Camp Qargha in Kabul when a soldier in the Afghan National Army shot him in the back during an inspection tour.

Laurel didn’t attend the funeral. She now lived less than fifteen minutes from his grave at Arlington Cemetery, but never visited.

She had issues with the old man.

There was a wound there.

But also a need. A need to prove herself. A need to show the world it couldn’t shoot her father in the back and get away with it. Not on her watch.

After high school, she attended Harvard on full scholarship and specialized in psychiatry. She graduated top of her class. She could have gone anywhere from there. She could have earned a million dollars a year at some specialist clinic.

But she chose to join the army.

She spent four years in military hospitals treating post-traumatic stress disorder and combat trauma before going overseas.