All I wanted was out, and dropping bodies for a different, more organized, and better funded organization made the most sense if they were going to give me an exit. They dangled the golden carrot in front of me and I couldn’t say no. Anonymity. Freedom. Forgiveness for every horrific crime they could pin on me. So I chased the carrot that hung in front of my eyes until my legs gave out. I signed on to kill the “right” people for the wrong reasons, from the inside . . . anything motivated by money and political goals to me smacked of immorality, and there was about as much honor in setting up young zealots to die as there had been in killing for my mother’s revenge and shattered heart.

I turned over sleeper cell after sleeper cell. I prevented bombings and bloodshed. I kept weapons out of the wrong hands and led the right people to them. I burned drug fields and turned over more money than I thought I would ever see in one lifetime to the proper authorities. I uncovered secrets and plans for attacks worldwide. I uncovered the location of terrorist camps and led more than just my government to the hidden locations in various hot spots around the globe while I played go-between for my government’s special operations and whoever they were in bed with at any given time. If there was something darker than black ops, that was where I was operating, and I hadn’t even grown out of my teenage years yet. I did everything that was asked of me, got in as deep as I could go, and once my time was up, the five years come and gone with more bodies and blood than I cared to think about, I fully expected the powers that be to keep up their end of the bargain.

I trusted them, like a fool. My mom had taught me better than that.

I should have known better than to blindly believe anyone with an agenda. I knew better than to think a human being ever came before a conviction or powerful people with ulterior motives and deep pockets.

The government wasn’t an extremist organization fighting for a belief, even if their motives and schemes were just as corrupt as any group labeled terrorists by the media. No, they were a massive political empire with their own endgame and motives to retain power and prestige, and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from them without repercussions. It was then that I realized there was more to the war than the winning side and the losing side. I realized there was my side. The side of the fighter. The side of the man going through the motions, not out of passion, but because he had no other choice. There was the side of desperation, and on that side, there were no rules. There was an army of one, and the war he fought was for survival and self-preservation.

When my five years was up, I was barely in my twenties; Mossad came back with more missions, more targets, more things they needed my special skill set to handle. They had invested too much time and energy in me to simply let me vanish into thin air. It became clear that the only way I was getting away, the only way I was leaving the desert behind, was if I did it on my own terms. Even if those terms meant that my blood would end up staining the desert sand. My mother had long since taken her own life, just one more sacrifice for a belief I couldn’t force myself to fight for anymore. I had no one and nothing left to lose.

I blew my cover on purpose. I let myself get caught, and when the bad guys tried to use me as leverage, tried to get the government to barter for me, I said nothing. I let them think I had value beyond my killing hands, and when the government and the military claimed they had no clue who I was, when they denied that I had ever worked for them, I let the men who had molded me and trained me take me back to where it all had started. I knew if I went with them I could finally have a chance at the one thing I had been after since I was old enough to figure out that what I was doing was wrong. Freedom. The chance to call my own shots for my own causes for once in my life. I knew the men who had turned a child into a killer wouldn’t go easy on a traitor, a man who not only double-crossed them, but who willingly went against everything they thought was worth killing for. Part of me welcomed the fury and pain because it meant an end to being nothing more than a weapon.

They tortured me and threatened all the worst kinds of punishment. I fully expected them to go after my head . . . literally.

But I was born into hell, so everything they did to me had already been done.

They wanted a spectacle. They wanted a show. They wanted something that they could put on TV so it got worldwide attention, so that the Americans would have to see what was going on in our little sandbox. I wanted to explain it was futile, that it was a lost cause. No one would care. No one.

I didn’t bother. I needed them to take me into the center of their camp so I could get my hands on what I needed in order to become a ghost. Terror was well funded, and if this war had taught me anything, it was that the side with the most capital had the upper hand on the playing field. Always.

Lifeless on the inside. Empty. I was already a dead man, so they didn’t expect a fight, but a fight was what they got. I could fight dirty and mean like them. I could fight cold and methodical like the government. But what would always give me the advantage over any adversary I faced was the first lesson my mother ever taught me. I had been born and bred to fight and never give up. The fight was in my bones. It was in every breath I exhaled. It was in every drop of blood that poured out of me and painted the soil.

I left no man standing. I took it all—money, guns, drugs—then I hiked what felt like a thousand miles into a desert that was even worse than the one that spawned me. Money in the right hands, guns in the wrong ones, making deals and promises as I slipped across borders and got myself on a freighter to that other promised land I’d heard so much about . . . America. Land of the free . . . home of the brave. To me it was just one big, sprawling, endless landscape of noise, people, confusion, and clutter that I could lose myself in. I would be another forgettable face in the crowd, and maybe I could finally stop the fight that had been hammered into me so hard that it felt like it was the only thing I was made of.

I bounced around a lot as soon as I hit the shore. I never got comfortable anywhere. I thought it was best to keep on the move just in case my old government or my new one was looking for me. Besides nothing seemed to fit. The glamour of L.A., the glitter of Vegas, the throb of New York . . . all of it felt wrong and made me antsy. There were things in each place that felt familiar, parts of each city that allowed me to sink into oblivion and indulge in all the ways I had been denied my entire life.

So many girls. So much money. So many different vices at my fingertips. I knew if I wasn’t careful, I could easily become a slave to another master. Addiction made men weak and the last fight I wanted to fight, now that things had become so quiet, was one with myself. So I drifted and listened to the people deep in the shadows. People like me.