“You ever forget something, and you can’t remember what it is? It’s a vicious little mind game. Distracting, too. Like an itch you can’t scratch.” Stell set the tablet down, and Dominic saw his own face staring up from the screen. Not the photo taken in the security scan, or one pulled from hall surveillance. No, the photo was a few years old, from his time in the service. “It was your name,” continued Stell. “I knew I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t remember where.” Stell turned the tablet and nudged it across the steel table. “Do you know what that is?”

Dominic scanned the screen. Beside his photo was a kind of profile, basic details—age, birthday, parents—along with facts about his life—

address, schooling, etc.—but there was an error.

Dominic’s middle name was listed here as Eliston.

His real middle name was Alexander.

“Have you heard of Eli Ever?” asked Stell.

Dom stilled, searching for the right answer, the right amount of knowledge. It had been public news—but how much of it, and which pieces? He’d only met Eli once, and only for an instant, the breath it took to step into the Falcon Price and pull Sydney—and her dog—out.

“The serial killer?” ventured Dom.

Stell nodded. “Eliot Cardale—known as Eli Ever in the press—was

one of the most dangerous ExtraOrdinaries in existence. He killed nearly forty people, and briefly used the Merit police databases—and the police force, for that matter—to create a list of targets, profiles of those he suspected to be EOs. This,” said Stell slowly, “is one of those profiles.”

Once, when Dominic was overseas, he’d walked into a room and found a live bomb. Not like the IED he’d stepped on. No, he’d never had time to see that explosion coming. But the bomb in this room had been as big as a steel drum, and the whole place was booby-trapped around it. He remembered looking down, seeing the trigger wire, barely an inch in front of his left boot.

Dom had wanted nothing more than to run away, as far as possible, but he hadn’t known where the other wires were, or even how he’d made it that far without triggering them. He’d had to pick his way out, one agonizing step at a time.

And here he was again, his footing precarious—one wrong move, and everything would blow.

“You’re asking if I’m an EO.”

Stell’s gaze was steady, unflinching. “We have no way of knowing if every person Eli targeted was actually—”

Dominic slammed the tablet down on the table. “I gave my flesh and blood and bones to this country. I gave everything I had to this country.