To give the orders to fight back.
But they never came.
After the years he’d spent in captivity, the relentless and brutal torture he’d survived, he’d thought of nothing more than his revenge.
Sam had left him to die.
Wallace had liberated him and nursed him back to health, continuously repeating to Mac that he was a soldier of the British Armed Forces and in his mind, it meant he was an asset.
True soldiers don’t leave men behind.
With the limitless funding extended to Wallace and his Blackridge organisation, Mac spent over a year battling through extensive reconstructive surgery and stomach-turning physiotherapy.
While it fixed his damaged body and rebuilt him as an elite, killing machine, Wallace paid no attention to the psychological damage years of brutal torture had caused. In Wallace’s eyes, it made Mac a unique asset.
A man without anything to lose.
Through the years, Mac had asked Wallace repeatedly for his revenge, but Wallace kept him away from the United Kingdom, insisting that Mac use his considerable talents and his penchant for violence to help him save the world.
Mac had killed multiple targets for the man, all in the name of the blind loyalty he showed to the man who not only rescued him from his horrific existence but had guided him to a life of meaning.
There had been bloodshed.
But he’d shed it gladly.
While he’d failed in his mission to kill Sam in Rome, he now knew that it was time to return to the UK and finally exact his revenge on his supposed friend who had left him for the wolves.
Sam had eventually gotten married.
Had a son.
Lived the life that Mac never had the chance to.
Seven years. Seven years trapped in a cell in a desolate terrorist training camp in the middle of nowhere.
Beaten.
Tortured.
Raped.
All because of Sam Pope.
And now Sam had killed the man who had pulled him back from the brink.
As the unremarkable man on the TV spoke about Sam Pope’s trial and his inevitable life behind bars, Mac felt his fists clench, the charred skin tightening across his murderous hands.
Staring at himself in the mirror, he wasn’t ashamed of the scars that run roughshod across his face.
He wore them with pride.
It was time to thank Sam for them, and with Wallace not in place to keep his leash tight, Mac promised himself that he would choke the life from Sam and enjoy every second of it.
The right eye, a beautiful white from the blindness incurred by the devastating blast, stared vacantly ahead. His left eye, an olive green, was watering, a tear of rage falling from it as he mourned Wallace and vowed his revenge.
As he began to pack the small number of possessions he kept in the dank hostel room in the south of Austria, he gritted his teeth and urged himself to keep everything under control.
It would take more than a prison to keep Sam Pope safe.
But it would take all his focus to force the UK to hand him over to him.
With revenge driving his every move, Mac marched to the door, threw his black overcoat over his wiry frame and slammed it shut for the last time, and began his long and unplanned journey back to the UK.
Back to Sam.
Back home.
Chapter Two
Sixty-eight years.
The rest of his life behind bars.
That was what Sam Pope was looking at. The holding cells at West Hampstead Police Station had been his home for the previous nine days, ever since he was pulled from the High Rise in Dulwich, his back sliced open from the brutal fight with ‘The Hangman of Baghdad’. As DI Amara Singh had helped him from the building, he barely registered the Armed Response team trained on him, their guns aimed, their fingers ready.
The rain had been beating down, the freshness of the water seemed to douse some of his pain, but not much.
Singh’s boss had been quick to get in his face, sneering as she sent him to the police van to be locked up and, most likely, the key thrown away.
After being rushed to the local hospital to have his body stitched back together, Sam had been taken to West Hampstead station, where he was booked in, told what he was being charged with, and then sent to his cell.
It had been one of the best night’s sleep he’d ever had, which was sadly interrupted in the early hours of the following morning by Singh’s irate superior.
Assistant Commissioner Ruth Ashton.
A career woman if ever Sam saw one, her sharp features and well-groomed attire gave off an attractive, yet fiercely professional aura, and she regarded Sam with complete malice. She’d demanded he be taken to an interview room, where she alone would interrogate him.
Sam refused the presence of a lawyer.
There was nothing for him to hide.
Nothing he wanted to fight.
To him, the fight was over.
They would read back to him the laundry list of crimes he’d committed ever since he’d embarked on his one-man war on crime, and unless they were inaccurate, he would gladly admit to them. While he knew taking the law into his own hands was a crime, he wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done.
The people he’d stopped.
The lives he’d saved.
He was proud of what he’d stood for and while he knew that he would likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, he didn’t regret it.
It had given him a purpose.
Something he’d been missing for over three years, ever since his beautiful son, Jamie, had been taken from him. Killed by a drunk driver who Sam should have stopped, Jamie had been Sam’s pride and joy. He had been the pinnacle of his love with Lucy, his ex-wife who left him when he never recovered.
Jamie’s death had broken Sam.
And while taking down criminal empires and killing sex traffickers wouldn’t change what
