Page 3 of Shadow of Misty Mountain

ABBY

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The email that starts it all isn’t marked urgent. No flaming subject line or blinking red flag. Just a boring, polite request from my editor to‘look into the background of our top-performing author for the upcoming contract renegotiation.’Which is code for find out who the hell this guy really is, since Jack Stratton doesn’t do interviews, social media, or bios. Hell, even his royalties are paid to a numbered Swiss bank account. His books hit the lists like a missile every time, and yet nobody’s even seen a picture of him.

Not even the head of publishing, which, of course, makes me want to dig.

Military thrillers that read like classified reports? Details too precise to be researched? Language and references only an insider would use? I’ve vetted enough manuscripts to know when someone’s writing from experience instead of imagination. And this guy—this ghost in the system—has seen things.

I pull the file. No photo. No phone number. Just a mailing address linked to a company in Zurich, a wire routing to ananonymous account. Not finding what I want on the internet, I move to the dark web.

The glow from my laptop is the only light in the apartment, casting a faint blue hue across the cluttered desk. The heater’s humming in the corner, but it can’t cut through the chill crawling up my spine. My fingers fly across the keyboard, each keystroke faster than the last, driven by the kind of desperation I promised myself I’d never feel again.

I should’ve stopped hours ago.

The database I cracked is older, but it’s connected to a shadow site—a message board frequented by fixers and freelancers. Men who don’t exist on paper. Names buried in classified files, buried deeper in the dark corners of the government and criminal networks.

I type the pseudonym again.

JACK STRATTON.

Another layer down. I bypass another proxy. Then another.

I find a partial hit—coordinates, encrypted logs from a long-dead site archived in fragments. I scroll through digital ash until something flickers on the edge of the page.

Travis Holt.

The name blinks once. I freeze.

I click.

The screen goes black.

“What the hell?”

I jolt back into the chair, heart hammering.

For two full seconds, the laptop is dead. Then, without warning, white text appears on the dark screen, bold and center:

STOP LOOKING.

Another pause. Then:

NEXT TIME, WE WON’T JUST WARN YOU.

I slam the laptop shut like that alone will keep me safe. The apartment feels different now. Smaller. Watched.

Somewhere out there, someone just saw me peek behind the wrong curtain—and they want me to know it. But I don’t close the file. I don’t delete the notes.

Because Nick wanted me to find Travis Holt—the one man I had always suspected had survived the mission that killed my brother. And now I know the name was never fiction, although his pen name was. Jack Stratton is Travis Holt’s pseudonym. But why doesn’t someone want me to know?

Reading it, I feel as though someone just punched me in the gut. Travis Holt. My dead brother’s CO. The man Nick talked about more than any other. The man he trusted more than our father. The man they called Shadow.

I sit back in my chair, heart thudding too hard. The manuscript in front of me blurs. Because this isn’t just a name. It’s him. This is the man my brother told me to find if anything ever went sideways. The man he made me swear I’d look for—if he didn’t make it back.

My heart seizes in my chest. The fact was, Nick didn’t make it back. They said it was an accident. Some messed up “training error” during a mission that wasn’t officially logged. Five men were dead. One body missing—Nick’s. A grave in a cemetery that holds nothing but an empty coffin.

They never gave me details. Never let me see his personal effects. I was told to grieve and move on. But I never believed it. I never felt like he was just gone. I knew he was dead, but I also knew I didn’t have the whole truth. Nick and the others must have known something, and whatever it was, it had been buried deep.

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