He was a Navy SEAL. He’d been in more firefights than his wife had had hot meals. Together with his team, he’d infiltrated into North Korea, connected with a mole, got a flash drive containing info on that crazy fuck Kim Jong Un’s plans for a rail gun, and exfiltrated without anyone knowing they’d been there. He was cool under fire. His heartbeat had been tested at 60 beats per minute under live fire. Every single SEAL was deemed ‘stress hardy’—able to immediately pump out neuropeptide Y in their brains at the first signs of stress. NPY acted like a fire hose extinguishing fear and keeping the neocortex thinking under stress when other people simply clocked out.So where twenty years of having everything but a nuclear bomb thrown at him couldn’t shake him, watching Allegra nearly kill herself did the trick.He was an expert on combat falls and his mind supplied a complete, 3-D, hi-def, Technicolor image of what was going to happen, a perfect storm of wrong place, wrong time.
