Thirty-six confirmed kills. One name on an Iraqi hit list. And a collar he never saw coming.
Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen gave the Marines twenty-one years and four tours of the steadiest hands in Force Recon. He was three days from his last deployment - three days from the beach, from his wife Maria, from his eight-year-old son Jake - when the chaplain walked into the CO's hut wearing a face that couldn't be softened.
*Murdered. San Diego. Both of them."
Wrong house, the detective said. Mistaken identity. No leads. These things take time.
Six months in an empty chair taught Dutch that time gives you nothing. So, he did the only thing a broken man who knows how to fight can do: he went back to the war. And when the war couldn't kill him either, something stranger came for him - a calling he didn't ask for, scrawled in a letter he doesn't even remember writing.
Now he's Father Alvarez Petersen, and his first parish is rotting from the inside. A trafficker's wife confesses through the screen. A monsignor with too much polish and too many secrets warns him to look the other way. And a single scrap of paper - a shipping container number, a name - pulls a thread that runs straight back to the cartel families who once made a mother, and a child disappear without a trace.
The Marines taught Dutch that threads are where everything starts.
He buried the sniper to save his soul.
He's about to dig him back up.
