PROLOGUE
Rain hammered softly against the apartment windows, steady and relentless, as if the world itself was trying to wear the place down one drop at a time.
Adam Commeree sat hunched at the kitchen table beneath a flickering light, shoulders tight, jaw clenched against the pain that never quite left anymore. His hands shook as he worked, not from fear, but from exhaustion — the kind that sank into the bones and refused to let go.
The revolver lay in pieces before him.
He assembled it slowly, deliberately, the way he’d done countless times before. The way he’d been trained. Muscle memory carried him when concentration slipped, when the ache in his spine sent sparks down his legs and made his vision blur.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Each round slid into the cylinder with a sound that felt too final.
When he snapped it shut, the noise echoed in the small apartment. Adam set the revolver down carefully, almost reverently, and rested his hands flat on the table until the shaking eased.
Standing hurt.
Everything hurt.
He pushed himself upright anyway, a low, involuntary sound escaping his throat as fire lanced through his spine. He stood there, breathing through clenched teeth, waiting for the pain to recede to something survivable.
It always did.
Eventually.
He moved across the apartment slowly, each step measured, each motion calculated. The place was small — quieter than it should have been, emptier than it deserved. He stopped in front of the few things he hadn’t boxed up or thrown away.
The awards from his time on the Navy boxing team hung crooked on the wall, their shine dulled with age. He’d chased those trophies hard once, fought through broken ribs and swollen knuckles for the approval that came with them.
The oak shadow box sat beneath them, glass polished clean, ribbons and medals arranged with ceremonial precision. He could still remember the weight of them being placed in his hands. The words spoken. The pride that had followed — brief, fleeting, and gone far too soon.
A photograph rested beside it.
His unit.
Relaxing after an operation in a place that didn’t exist on any map. Helmets off. Weapons set aside. Smiling like they didn’t know yet how many of them wouldn’t make it home.
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Adam stared at the photo longer than the rest.
Some nights, he still heard their voices.
He turned toward the window without realizing it and caught sight of his reflection.
The man looking back at him was a stranger.
Gone was the thick black hair he’d worn for most of his life. Chemo had taken that first. Gone too was the strength in his frame, the easy confidence in his posture. His face looked hollow now, eyes sunken deep into dark rings that sleep no longer touched.
He looked sick.
He was sick.
He’d always believed there would be time.
Twenty years of service, and then he’d live. That was the deal he’d made with himself. That after the missions, after the deployments, after the long nights holding broken people together, he’d finally get to choose his own life.
God laughed.
With two years left on his contract, the diagnosis came down like a death sentence. Osteosarcoma. Spine cancer, fiercely aggressive and always terminal. He was given only three to six months to live.
The navy wasted no time medically separating him, there was no treatment worth mentioning and no possible recovery. Just pain management and waiting. Waiting for the moment that death came or that he lost himself to the disease.
Purpose bled out of him after that.
The nightmares came back worse than before. Faces he couldn’t save. Hands slick with blood. The sound of screaming in places where screaming shouldn’t exist. PTSD had always been there, crouched low in the dark, but sickness had dragged it back into the light.
Nothing was more terrifying than losing control.
Not of a battlefield.
Not of a patient.
Of your own body.
Adam felt the cold spread through his chest as he thought about how much of his life had been spent trying to be useful, trying to matter. He’d given everything he had to causes that never asked if he had anything left.
And now there was nothing.
No strength.
No future.
No dignity left to lose.
He lowered himself back into the chair heavily, breath coming shallow. The revolver waited on the table where he’d left it.
Adam had always believed suicide was cowardly. He’d told patients that. Told brothers-in-arms that. Believed it, once. But beliefs were easier when you weren’t drowning.
Every movement hurt now. The numbness in his legs crept higher every week. He could feel himself slipping — mentally, physically — and the thought of losing himself before his body finally quit terrified him more than dying ever had.
The only thing he still controlled was the end and even that felt like it was slipping away.
His hand trembled as he reached for the revolver.
Before his fingers could touch it, the air shimmered.
A translucent golden screen unfolded silently between his hand and the gun. Its glow was soft, warm — jarringly gentle in the middle of everything else.
Words formed slowly.
Would you like the chance to live again in a new world?
Yes??No
Adam stared at it, chest rising and falling unevenly.
A broken laugh tore out of him. “Figures,” he rasped. “Now I’m hallucinating.”
PTSD. Pain meds. The brain eating itself.
His hand hovered, shaking.
“But hell,” he whispered, voice barely there, “it’s not like I’ve got anything left to lose.”
His fingers moved — not to the revolver.
They passed through the light and pressed Yes.
The screen vanished.
The room flooded with warmth, soft and overwhelming, wrapping around him like hands he didn’t remember consenting to. Adam closed his eyes as sensation drained away, the pain loosening its grip for the first time in months.
For the first time in a very long while—
He wasn’t hurting.
And somewhere beyond the rain and the dark, something answered.
