Introduction

My life was simple, if not exactly thrilling.

An ex-Army Ranger, now a mechanic, living with my CEO wife, Cassie, in a world miles from my own.

Then the call came, shattering everything: my mother, an intrepid investigative journalist, brutally murdered, dismembered, her eyes gouged out, her tongue cut.

The police couldn't find a lead until security footage revealed the custom-engraved hunting knife – and then, I saw it, advertised for auction by my own wife's company.

My wife, Cassie, bought the very weapon for her charismatic executive assistant, Marcus Vance – the man my mother had been investigating.

He taunted me with vivid details of her torture, laughing as he had me beaten, then imprisoned in our home' s steel-reinforced panic room, my own wife convinced I was simply 'unstable.'

Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, Marcus brought in an urn.

My mother' s ashes, he casually explained, would make a 'strong, durable, permanent' foundation for our driveway.

The ultimate desecration, a final, horrifying insult that crushed me.

How could my life, my family, have fallen to such depravity?

But in that moment of absolute despair, something shifted.

A Ranger doesn' t break.

I escaped, battered and bleeding, making a desperate pilgrimage to Washington D.C.

There, at the steps of the Department of Justice, I collapsed, but not before leaving my father' s Medal of Honor and a bloody handprint – a silent, defiant cry for justice against the monsters in my own home.