Fracture

Book 1 of Shadow Sovereign Series

She stole her husband’s secrets to survive. He lost a friend and inherited a war. The conspiracy that connects them could shatter NATO.

Katya married a Russian intelligence officer before she understood what he was. For five years in Ankara, she watched herself become his operation: her languages, her financial expertise, her access to diplomatic circles, all quietly weaponized. When she discovers his hidden ledger in a Turkish library, she photographs every page and sets in motion a chain of events that will burn his cover, expose a secret network, and force her to run for her life through Istanbul and Dubai with SVR kill teams closing in behind her.

Thousands of miles away, U.S. geopolitical strategist Roger “Simms” Osbourne is staring at data that doesn’t add up. A Ukrainian tanker has gone down in the Baltic, and the official explanation is a navigational error. Simms sees something else: a ghost ship conjured from code, designed to force a fatal collision and disguise an act of war as human error. Before he can act on it, his friend and colleague Aslı Green is killed in a London hit-and-run. Her final, unfinished message points him toward the same shadow. The last word she typed was meant for him.

Armed with a brevet rank and presidential authority, Simms is sent to London to secure parliamentary approval for TAPSA, a NATO surveillance system that could expose the very methods Russia used to sink the tanker. What he finds is an entrenched political machine determined to kill the project. A powerful lord chairs a rigged committee. A Crown Prince lends the opposition royal cover. And the media campaign against him is funded by money no one can trace.

When Katya and Simms’s paths converge on the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, they form an alliance built on shared loss and overlapping targets. Katya brings the financial architecture she spent years learning inside her husband’s world, and a network of operatives who work in the spaces between nations. Together, they crack an offshore vault in Dubai and expose the pipeline: Russian Admiral Sidorov’s insider trading profits, laundered through crypto and shell companies, funding the British political operation strangling TAPSA in Westminster, and paying for Aslı’s murder.

But Sidorov is not waiting for the dust to settle. His fleet demonstration in the Baltic humiliates NATO’s defenses, proving that Europe cannot act without American force. His political operation in London has already won the public argument. And he thinks in centuries, not operations. He has been patient before. He will be patient again.

Now Simms must wage a war across three fronts: political, financial, and military. The system that sent him is the same system that buried the truth about his past. The allies protecting him have agendas of their own. And the only way to honor a dead friend may demand that both he and Katya become people they never intended to be.

Fracture is the first book in the Shadow Sovereign series.

For fans of Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney, and Brad Thor.