He pushed away Jack’s voice, exhaled through clenched teeth.

Whatever Jack had hoped for him couldn’t be worth as much as the sight of Alison Siegler being tended to by paramedics. Her shoulders had been hunched and she’d started at the touch of the paramedics, but when she rose to walk to the ambulance, she’d stood tall, unbroken. Evan had been across the St. Johns River by then, watching from an unlit pier on the opposite bank.

He took another sip, let the Stoli blaze a path through his insides. After the past couple weeks, he couldn’t get his muscles to believe that it was safe to relax. The alarm was set, the front door barred, the windows armored. Even the walls here had been upgraded—half-inch residential Sheetrock replaced with five and eight-tenths commercial-grade, which provided better sound attenuation and more structural rigidity in the event that someone tried to breach the place. He considered how much of his life he’d spent bricking himself in.

A wife. Maybe even kids. I tried to free you. I didn’t think you’d scurry right back to it.

What else did he know? For his entire adult life, he’d been one of those rough men standing ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do harm. A sentry willing to go up against the Hector Contrells and René Cassaroys, the Assim al-Hakeems and Tigran Sarkisians. If not him, then who? Maybe now that he’d been freed from the guilt of killing Jack, he’d be freed from seeking endless absolution for his sins. Freed from being the Nowhere Man.

Which meant he could be someone.

Someone real.

He thought of Mia and Peter out in the neighborhood right now, going door-to-door, collecting Kit Kats and M&M’s.

He downed the last of the vodka, studied the empty glass, trying to ratchet himself back to reality.

He had to get a new RoamZone up and running in the event Anna Rezian had found the next client requiring his help. He owed her, and he owed whoever would call.

Plus, René was out there. Which meant Evan still had a job to do. As Evan sat here waxing philosophical over an empty tumbler, René was no doubt already laying the foundations for his next operation, another kidnapping, the next gruesome medical lab. If Evan wanted to finish René, he’d have to beat the FBI to him while dodging Van Sciver and his attack-dog Orphans.

He owed as much to Despi. She’d brought him a tire jack, and her entire family had been slaughtered for it. I don’t know how to live with this, she’d told him. With what I saw.

René was a devourer of lives. Evan couldn’t let him continue, not with the wreckage he’d leave in his wake.