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Common sense told him to back away from his mother’s house very slowly. To melt into the night and disappear. To leave behind everyone and everything he’d ever known and never look back.

Alex’s head felt like it was going to explode as he watched the only two women who’d ever been important in his life through the window of that house.

He was so full of conflicted feelings and thoughts he couldn’t make sense of any of it.

What the hell was he supposed to do, now?

Surely, Claudia dangling Katie as bait to suck him inside, but it looked as if their conversation had turned into more than a one-sided interrogation of Katie.

Was it all an act? Had the two of them been working together all along?

Think . Work through the logic. Except logic refused to come. Instead, feelings bombarded him from every direction. Voices. His father’s voice. André’s voice. Katie’s. Dawn’s. The voices of the people he’d killed. Those he had yet to kill. The cacophony deafened him.

He mashed his hands against his ears, but nothing would silence the babbling chorus. All of them pushing and pulling at him, tugging him one way and then another. Back and forth like a rag doll. God, they were tearing him to pieces.

He squinted at the house, brightly lit from within, barely able to make it out as everything spun wildly around him. Something warm brushed past him. He threw a hand out to steady himself and his fingers sunk into thick, coarse hair. The damned cow was back, looking for food.

He clung to its back for balance, for sanity, until it shifted away from him uncomfortably. But the animal had done its job, given him something concrete to focus on. Given him a second to find himself.

Slowly, laboriously, Alex pushed every thought out of his mind. Every sensation. He took a breath. Held it. Exhaled slowly. Again.

When all else failed, he returned to the beginning. To the most basic act of existence. Breathing. Cold air filled his lungs but was hot in his nostrils when he blew it out.

Better. He stretched his senses to include the night sky above him. It was black since the moon wouldn’t rise for a few more hours. Tiny pinpricks of light peppered it. Stars. Stable, predictable stars.

He expanded his awareness to include the darkness around him. The dew-covered grass soaking wetness and cold through his shoes. The rough warmth radiating from the cow a few feet away, its earthy smell.

House. Barn. Trees. Light. One by one, he added the objects around him to his awareness. Cautiously, very cautiously, he added thought.

Katie was inside. His mother’s men had snatched her. Bait. They were holding her to lure him out.

Decision. He had to make one. Leave Katie to her own devices. Or rescue her.

He loosed the reins on his mind enough to let it evaluate the threat. Not great odds of success if he went in. Better to make them bring her out.

The exercise of forcing his mind into a semblance of discipline was exhausting. More so than he’d expected. Faint surprise registered. Was this what it felt like to go mad?

He’d wondered a few times in the past if he’d been losing it, but he’d been wrong before. This was what total loss of mental and emotional control felt like. The scientist within him registered and catalogued sensations and observations.

He started when abrupt movement filled the living room window. Two men, previously not visible to him, stepped out of the corners of the room to take Katie by the arm. They would take her out back, to the barn. That was where he would execute a prisoner. Out of sight. Sound muffled.

Except the men headed for the front of the house. Pushed her out onto the porch. Ahh. Getting frustrated with her little fishing expedition, his mother was. Tired of this game, she was. Claudia was going to force the issue. Maybe have her guys shoot Katie in the kneecaps.

His odd detachment retreated a little. The idea of Katie in pain burned away some of the haze shrouding his brain. Or was that haze actually shock? Was this shock from the inside looking out?

The physician within him took notes for the next time he had to deal with a trauma patient in shock.

Now what? Katie’s trademark question floated through his mind. If he wasn’t going to let them kill her, he probably shouldn’t let them maim her. It would be a useless waste of her body.

But something stubborn deep within him, some part of him determined to survive, and furthermore to win, rebelled against meekly surrendering to those bastards. He spied the tall, slender form of his mother rising from her seat to follow Katie outside.

Now .

His body went into motion of its own volition, propelling him at a silent sprint toward the back of the house. His instincts had spotted the opening before his conscious mind had. His body had started exploiting it before his thoughts even began to catch up to his training.

Roman might be a bastard, but he’d trained a hell of an operative.

And what his father hadn’t accomplished, his mother and her cronies at the CIA had finished off.

He was a creature of the night. Of shadows and stealth. Of cunning and violence. He was exactly the son his parents had raised him to be. For the first time in his life, he embraced what he was with a certain measure of peace.

They’d each wanted a killer for their separate reasons—and they’d gotten one. But he was better than either of them could even begin to dream of.

He raced up the back steps to the kitchen door.

The lock was so old and simple he didn’t even need a second lock pick to throw the tumblers.

One did the job. He was inside in a few seconds.

He padded across the marble tiles of the kitchen floor and glided down a short hallway. The front door was straight ahead.

Katie was visible on the porch, as were the restraining arms of her captors on either side of her. Alex waited, perfectly still, part of the shadows themselves. His mother stepped in front of the door, back a few feet from the opening.

“Go ahead, Katie,” Claudia ordered. “Call for him to come out. Feel free to tell him that my men are going to shoot you very painfully if he doesn’t.”

Katie whimpered a little and then shouted, “It’s a trap, Alex! Run!”

One of the men back-handed her viciously. Blood flew from her mouth in an arc that splatted on the white porch column as Alex lunged. In one blindingly fast move, he was at his mother’s back. His left arm went around her throat, and his right hand jammed a pistol to her neck, under her ear.

He growled, “We meet at last, mother mine.”

The men on the porch whirled and their weapons came to bear on him.

In his mother’s ear, he murmured, “You might want to explain to your thugs that my pistol has a hair trigger. Tell them how the impact of a bullet slamming into my skull will cause an involuntary reflex that makes my fists clench. Your brain will be sprayed all over the house along with mine. Shall we die together, Mother?”

Even he heard the acid in his voice when he said the word.

The woman in his arms went deceptively relaxed and then lurched violently, attempting to tear free of his grasp.

As if he hadn’t seen that one coming from a mile away. He tapped her almost gently in the temple with the barrel of his pistol. Just enough to daze her but not enough to knock her out cold.

“Tsk, tsk,” he chided. In the moment it had taken for him to subdue Claudia, Katie had managed to get herself turned around in her guards’ arms to face him. The voices were clamoring again in his head. He had a gun to his mother’s head. How fucked up was that?

Katie looked equal parts relieved and chagrined to see him. “I told you to run. To save yourself.”

“My mother. My problem.”

She stared at him closely. Worry blossomed in her big blue eyes.

Dammit, she knew him too well. She saw how hard he was having to fight to hold it together. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if willing him to hear her. “She’s not worth it, Alex.”

His mother stirred in his arms, rousing to full awareness once more.

He ordered grimly, “Call off the dogs, Claudia. I’d hate to have to kill this batch, too.”

“It was a tactical mistake to call my ops center, Alexei,” Claudia said calmly. “It was obvious that you would make a run at me like this. You didn’t seriously think I would not take precautions to protect myself, did you?”

As if on cue, a half-dozen weapons safeties disengaged behind Alex. Sonofabitch. She’d had an entire back-up team just sitting in the woods, waiting for him to show himself. Bastards had probably had him in their sights all along.

“Disarm him if you please, gentlemen,” Claudia said pleasantly.

Hard hands grabbed him, yanked the pistol out of his hands, and searched him roughly and rudely. He was manhandled back into the living room, along with Katie.

“Found this, ma’am,” one of the heavily body-armored men announced. Alex spied the flash disk of chemical weapons evidence in the guy’s palm.

“I’ll take that,” Claudia announced triumphantly.

She moved over to the roll-top secretary’s desk in the corner and opened a laptop computer.

The tableau of armed men and prisoners froze in time as the computer turned on and booted up.

His mother plugged the flash drive into the computer and quickly opened the contents.

Photographs, the gas chromatograph readouts, and his own case notes flashed onto the screen. “I’ll be quite the hero for bringing in this evidence,” Claudia purred.

“Other people in the agency will know where it came from and who obtained it.”

“Of course they will. The loving son shared it with his thankful mother just before an unfortunate accident claimed his life and that of his girlfriend. So many enemies my poor son had. One of them finally caught up with him.”

He watched dispassionately as she typed out a quick e-mail, attached the contents of the flash drive to it and hit the Send button with a flourish.