Chapter 1

      The Beginning

      Mark woke in a hospital bed in prison. The left side of his face was swollen with cuts along his cheekbone and eyebrow. His left eye was completely swollen shut. He looked down at his hand. His right was bloody across his knuckles. It was also handcuffed to the bed rail. His ribs were wrapped, and it hurt to breathe.

      The prison doctor walked up. “You’re awake. That’s good. You know one of these days they’re gonna get the best of you.”

      Mark spoke and heard his own voice sounding muffled. “How many?”

      The doc looked into his eyes with a penlight. “How many guys did it start with, or how many did it end with?”

      He swallowed and felt the soreness in his throat. “How many did I kill?”

      The doc straightened. “Two. You broke one’s neck and choked the other guy to the point you crushed his esophagus. What made you so mean in your life?”

      Mark shook his head. “Life didn’t make me mean, Doc. Combat did and a man in Georgia. Call me TK. That’s what my friends call me.”

      The doc patted him on the shoulder. “We’re not friends, Mark. You just end up in here every week, getting something looked at or sewn up. You’ll be in here for a few days this time. The injury to your eye is pretty severe. I don’t want you back in population until the swelling goes down.”

      “Thanks, Doc. Hard for me to keep them off me if I can’t see them coming.”

      The doc walked away, and Mark reached up with his left hand to feel the damage on his face. He couldn’t remember the fight this time. From the amount of damage, he could assume that he got kicked in the face or something. That must have knocked him out. He had to get out of this prison.

      Mark wouldn’t join any particular group in prison, and that got him against several. He would fight somebody in one of the groups about every two weeks. He would tear them up or, in today’s fight, kill someone, and that would buy him a month of peace in solitary confinement. Soon though someone would come after him to seek revenge.

      He had been a Special Forces soldier, trained to the max by the military in hand-to-hand combat, special weapons, and counterintelligence. He spent fifteen years in the army doing just that. The nickname TK had come from the colonel he saved during one mission. The colonel’s convoy was hit, and he had been taken hostage. Mark and three others were sent in to get him. Killing almost twenty Taliban soldiers in the rescue. The colonel started calling him TK after he cut one of the Taliban’s throats with a knife so fast the guy didn’t even know he was cut. The colonel called him The Killer for a while, and eventually it got shortened to TK.

      The colonel never forgot the event and had pushed for Mark’s promotion and reassignment. Mark left the dessert shortly after that and became the colonel’s right-hand man. The colonel was part of a special unit gathering intel on terrorists all over the world. Mark found himself in situations constantly that took a cool head and quick reflexes. The gig was great for the next four years.

      Mark had met a young girl two years into the assignment and began dating. They were getting more and more serious and had begun discussing marriage. She lived close to the base he was stationed at in North Carolina. She was a waitress at one of the bars Mark would frequent from time to time. They were a thing almost immediately.

      Mark was on a mission to some foreign place with zero communication. Katie, his girlfriend, was used to guys hitting on her and always handled it quickly. One night a guy was persistent, and she began to get uncomfortable. She told the manager, and he angrily told the guy to leave. Katie finished the shift, and one of the guys walked her to her car. She never noticed the guy following her as she left the parking lot. Video surveillance showed the truck leave behind her but didn’t catch the tag number.

      Mark came home to multiple messages from the police and several from the owner of the bar. Katie never made it home that night. Her car was found off a stretch of dark highway down in the ditch. Keys in the ignition with a damaged rear end. The police report stated that it was a kidnapping by a staged rear end collision and forced crash into the ditch. Mark