Part One
I returned from twelve years of black ops missions to find my mother serving cocktails at a poolside party in the waterfront mansion I’d bought for her on the California coast. She walked past me with a tray of drinks, eyes cloudy, shoulders bent. When she finally noticed me standing there in a contractor’s uniform, she squinted and asked if I was there to fix the air conditioning.
She didn’t recognize the Navy SEAL standing in front of her. She didn’t know that the man in the contractor’s uniform had over eighty million dollars in cryptocurrency and a burning need to take down the people who had stolen her life. My name is Michael Reed.
I’m sixty‑two years old. For the last twelve years, I’ve been operating in places that don’t exist on maps, doing things the government will never officially acknowledge. I’ve survived IEDs in Fallujah, firefights in Mogadishu, and a helicopter crash in the mountains of Afghanistan.
I came home with more scars than skin and a Purple Heart I’ll never wear. But none of that prepared me for what I found when I walked up the driveway of 2847 Ocean Boulevard, La Jolla, California, United States of America. I had purchased this property fifteen years earlier, in cash, after my first major contract payout—six‑point‑eight million dollars for eight thousand square feet of pure California dream.
White stucco walls. Spanish tile roof. An infinity pool that spilled right into the horizon of the Pacific Ocean.
I bought it for my mother, Emma Reed, the woman who raised me alone after my dad died when I was seven. I bought it so she could spend her final years in comfort, so she could watch the sunset from the same kind of terrace where we used to sit and eat ice cream when I was a kid visiting the beach. Before I flew home, I called ahead.
I told my younger brother, Daniel, that I was coming back to the States. He sounded surprised. Almost panicked.
“Mom’s doing great,” he said quickly. He told me the house was perfect, that everything was exactly as I’d left it. He said he’d been taking care of her, managing the property, making sure she wanted for nothing.
He lied. The gate was standing open when I arrived. A catering truck was parked in the circular driveway.
Music and laughter drifted from the backyard, carried on the kind of warm ocean breeze you only get in Southern California. I moved along the side of the house, boots silent on the gravel path out of sheer habit. Old training never goes away.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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