Chapter 1 - The Smell That Wasn't Lavender
The front door to my house was standing open.
That was the first thing wrong. Sienna never left a door unlocked, not once in six years of marriage, not even to run out to the mailbox.
I stepped inside slow, my duffel bag sliding off my shoulder as the silence swallowed the whole house whole. No radio. No television murmuring from the kitchen. No trace of her lavender perfume hanging in the air the way it always did.
Just bleach. Strong enough to sting my eyes.
And underneath it, something I knew from three deployments overseas that I never expected to smell in my own living room.
Blood.
My pulse dropped instead of spiking. Training does that — takes the panic and turns it into something colder and more useful.
I moved through the house room by room. Furniture knocked sideways. A lamp shattered against the kitchen wall. Faint drag marks scored into the floorboards, running toward the hallway.
Then I saw it — a small dark smear near the bottom of the staircase, already dried brown.
"Sienna?" My voice came out louder than I meant it to.
Nothing answered me.
By the time I reached the hospital, my hands were shaking worse than they ever had in combat.
A doctor met me outside the ICU doors, his gloves still marked with blood, his eyes hollowed out from a long night.
"Captain Cole." He said my name like it hurt him to. "Your wife is alive. Barely."
Alive. I held onto that word like a rope.
Then I walked into the room, and my whole world came apart at the seams.
Sienna lay under a sheet so white it made every bruise on her face look darker than it should have. One eye was swollen completely shut. Tubes ran into both arms. Bandages wrapped her ribs, her skull, places I didn't want to look at too long.
I took her hand carefully, like it might break in mine.
The doctor cleared his throat. "Thirty-one fractures. Severe blunt force trauma. Repeated strikes."
"Repeated," I repeated back to him, quiet.
May you like
He nodded, grim.
"This wasn't random."
