Ryland lifted his head, his steel gray eyes as cold as ice. Menacing. He didn’t try to hide the danger he represented. They had created him, they had betrayed him, and he wanted them to be afraid. There was tremendous satisfaction in knowing they were…and that they had reason to be.

Everything inside of him stilled. Calmed. Reached. He studied the woman. Her eyes were incredible, but wary. Intelligent. Knowledgeable. As if she recognized him, too, in some elemental way.

He fought for his country, but mostly he fought for the people in his country so they had freedom to make choices. He just hoped they'd be good ones.

He hoped they were wrong, but he had a bad feeling, that nagging one that always told him he was right. He didn't like knowing, but that radar had saved not only him, but his fellow GhostWalkers on more than one occasion.

she was there, pouring need and passion into him. Pouring something else that felt like love. He was so unfamiliar with that emotion, that at first, he wasn't certain what it was that surrounded him and lifted him up. That he chased after. That he craved.

He loved knowing she was his woman. Some men needed many to make themselves feel like a man. He had always needed one. The only. Now that he had her, he knew why.

Solidarity. She was with him. She would be with him through whatever he had to endure. He had that.

Just talking about it made his leg hurt even worse. He smelled the gunpowder. The stench of blood and death. Heard the beat of helicopter rotors. The bark of Rubin's gun. So precise. So deadly. The pain of his shattered bone.

He forced air through his lungs and with it, brought in the scent of Amaryllis. The moment he took her in, his world changed. Lightened. She could do that, without doing more than existing.