I was five thousand miles from home when a nurse called me sobbing and said, “Blake… they broke both of your wife’s legs.” Then a man took the phone from her, laughed, and whispered, “Come do something about it, soldier. My father owns the police.” Fourteen hours later, I landed on American soil—and two sheriff’s cruisers were already waiting for me.

Midnight fell over Richmond like a lead blanket. The rain had slowed to a heavy, damp mist that clung to the asphalt and muffled the sounds of the city.

In a safehouse tucked away in an industrial park ten miles from St. Jude’s—a nondescript brick warehouse officially registered to a defunct logistics firm—Ghost Squad had set up a makeshift command center.

The interior smelled of stale coffee, gunpowder, and wet canvas. Laptops glowed in the dim light, casting an eerie blue pallor over the faces of Miller, Reyes, and Jax. On the central table lay a massive digital schematic of Henrico County, highlighting every property, bank account, shell corporation, and police precinct linked to Richard Voss and Sheriff Nathan Cole.

Blake stood over the table, staring at a financial ledger that Reyes had pulled from an encrypted offshore server belonging to Voss Enterprises.

"Look at this," Reyes said, tapping his screen. "For the last five years, Voss Enterprises has been funneling monthly payments—twenty-five thousand dollars a pop—into a private slush fund managed by Sheriff Cole. It’s a protection racket on a county-wide scale. Every real estate acquisition Voss made through eminent domain fraud was backed by county police intimidation."

"And Emily caught Cameron doing something even worse," Blake said, his voice flat as he traced a line on the map between the parking garage where Cameron had assaulted the young woman three weeks ago and Voss headquarters. "The girl Cameron assaulted—her name is Sarah Lin. She was an intern at Voss Enterprises. She filed a police report, and forty-eight hours later, her family’s mortgage was bought out by a shell company, and she vanished."

Jax looked up from his rifle-cleaning kit, his hands steady as he reassembled the bolt carrier group. "You think she's still in the county?"

"I know she is," Blake said, straightening up. "Because General Hale’s contacts at the FBI field office dropped a secondary file into my secure inbox ten minutes ago. Sarah Lin’s car was found abandoned near an old gravel quarry off Route 5. The county police logged it as 'abandoned/towed,' but there’s no impound record."