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Prologue
“Lincoln?” The female voice sounded as if it were echoing through a deep cave. “Can you hear me?”
Lincoln Atwood tried to drag his eyes open. Bright light shone against his eyelids. His entire left side throbbed. He tasted blood.
But his heart was still beating. The air around him felt still and quiet, no longer exploding with noise, chaos, and terror. He was stable. He recalled a doctor telling him he was a lucky man, that the injury could have been much worse, that it was a good thing he’d been wearing body armor and standing next to the crumbled building, which had absorbed most of the bomb’s impact.
Most of.
The burn and shrapnel wounds would leave permanent scars. Whether he regained full muscle movement in his left arm and shoulder remained to be seen.
He pulled his eyes open and focused on the nurse peering down at him. Her weathered face was both kind and tired.
“Is there someone we can call for you?” she asked. “The doctor wants to get you on the flight to Bethesda tomorrow. There’s no emergency contact on your phone, and no one has any information about a family member or friend.”
Family member. Friend.
“After a few weeks of rehab, you’ll be right as rain.” The nurse smiled and patted his leg. “But I know you’ll feel better if you talk to a loved one. We can arrange a video call.”
Lincoln would have liked to attribute his lack of response to brain fog caused by pain and drugs. But while he’d followed the normal protocols used for media personnel embedding with military troops in Afghanistan, he hadn’t provided any next-of-kin information.
“Got a wife or a girlfriend?” the nurse persisted.
He shook his head. The faces of a dozen women lit through his mind and disappeared just as quickly, like fireflies.
“Then who can we contact?” She straightened his pillow.
His agent? His lawyer? One of the Folio Publishing editors or board members?
A humorless laugh stuck in his throat at the thought of any one of them showing up in Bethesda to see him through a course of recovery and rehab.
“I find it hard to believe that a famous author like you doesn’t have a whole mess of people who’ll come running when they hear you were injured,” the nurse said.
His parents were both gone. Even if they hadn’t been, Lincoln wasn’t so sure they’d have “come running” to be at his side. Any aunts, uncles, and cousins were all scattered around the world and more distant than strangers.
Which left…
Sam.
His younger brother was somewhere in California. Or not. Lincoln had no idea. Sam had left New York a decade ago and returned only once, when their mother had died. That awkward, tense reunion five years ago had been the last time Lincoln saw his brother. Sam hadn’t come back when their father died.
“Any other family members?” the nurse asked.
“No.” Lincoln closed his eyes. “There’s no one.”
