Excerpt:

Only someone who had come back from the dead truly knew how deadly distractions could be.

Danielle Moore had let personal feelings get in the way over a year ago and nearly lost her life. So she kept her eyes glued to the man — six foot two inches of thick muscle — as he charged at her like a linebacker after a quarterback, arms outstretched to try and trap her in his embrace.

Dani used his momentum against him, sweeping him aside with a matador-like side-step. Turning quickly, she snapped an elbow to the back of his neck as he stumbled by and dropped him to the ground. Before she could totally incapacitate him, another man charged at her from the opposite side of the room.

She pushed off his friend’s falling body and came up ready for action, but as she did so, something pulled oddly along her midsection. A twinge of pain followed, but she tamped it down. She couldn’t allow physical discomfort or weakness to divert her attention.

As the smaller man shoved away his lumbering friend, who landed with a dull thud on the floor, she released a sharp drop kick at him, catching him squarely in the chest and rocking him backward, where he immediately tripped over the prone man. Both men sprawled to the ground in a messy heap.

Dani stopped, placed her hands on her hips and laughed as they tried to untangle themselves and resume their attack.

“Come on, boys. Is that the best you can do?” she teased in fluent French.

After months of training with them, they had developed an easy camaraderie. Even now when they couldn’t seem to contain Dani as her physical strength and martial arts prowess returned rapidly, the men accepted her superior abilities good naturedly.

Her current physical state was quite a difference from how she had been nearly three months ago, Dani thought.

After lingering in a coma off and on after being shot, she had emerged from it long enough to approve the removal of the bullet that had lodged precariously close to her spine. Three months after that, she had finally been well enough to begin physical therapy and try to get back into shape.

She had a new mission waiting for her, after all. Or at least that’s what the enigmatic man by her bedside had intimated to her so many months ago.

Dani now knew who that mysterious angel was — Corbett Lazlo — the elusive powerhouse behind the Lazlo Group, a private agency known for handling the most discreet and sometimes dangerous of missions. A group well known to her from her time at SIS, the British equivalent of the CIA and also the agency at which she had worked as the Sparrow — a world renowned assassin.

Only she hadn’t really been an assassin. All her supposed “kills” had been taken into SIS custody so that SIS might find out more information about an elusive crime organization responsible for a number of illegal operations.

She had let her last mission get personal. Her actions had resulted in the death of the Prince of Silvershire and had nearly caused her death and that of her twin sister. SIS had been less than pleased that in her quest to find her parents’ killers, she had messed up the mission in Silvershire, the small European island kingdom she had called home at one time. With her cover as the Sparrow possibly blown and a possible international incident brewing, SIS had tossed her out.

Lazlo, who had also been thrown out of the SIS many years earlier, was the one to thank for keeping her alive. He was also the one responsible for the medical treatment that had basically worked a miracle and brought her back from the dead.

He had taken her into his agency and told her that he would let her know when the time was right for her to be reborn and go out on another mission.

Feeling mission-ready, she sensed that somehow Lazlo would know that.

He seemed to know everything about everyone while she, like most of the people she had met within his group, knew little about him. To her surprise, few had even seen the elusive Mr. Lazlo, but she hoped to one day meet him face to face.

After thanking her two sparring partners for the training session, she walked to the gym to finish her workout. She took a place at the first station and lifted the weights, evenly pushing up the bars on the bench press. Pleased with the strength she had regained in her arms. Satisfied as she finished her reps and moved onto the next station and then the next. By the time she finished, her muscles trembled from her exertions, but it was a good feeling. The kind of sore that said she was getting stronger.

The kind of pain which confirmed that she was still alive.

In the locker room, she peeled off her clothes and grabbed a towel, ready for a long soak in the Jacuzzi. As she passed a mirror, she stopped short, surprised by what stared back at her.

The image of a hard-bodied woman of average height was reflected in the mirror. Hair shoulder-length and in need of a trim. Shoulders fine-boned, but leading to full breasts above a long, barely pink scar that ran down the middle of her. Beside the scar to one side — a ragged stellar-shaped wound where she had been shot during her last mission.

The wounds of the past year were alive in her vision much like those in her heart which had been there for much longer. The scar of her parents’ murder. The ragged and still unhealed wound from Mitch’s death barely three years ago.

Dani ran her hand down the long scar, but it was numb. Much as she was numb inside. Paralyzed because she still had things to do so that she could maybe feel alive again.

So that she could maybe finally go home. Go and see her twin sister, Elizabeth.

Only much as she had heard before, she suspected that you could never truly go home again.