The Consultant

For thirty-three years, Richard Ashford has lived a perfect double life.

By day, he’s a highly-paid corporate consultant — methodical, unremarkable, obsessed with operational efficiency and his prize-winning dahlia garden. By night, he’s something far more dangerous: a government-sanctioned assassin who has executed eighty-eight eliminations without leaving a trace.

Richard has mastered the art of compartmentalization, keeping his personas separate with surgical precision. The consultant. The gardener. The killer. Each exists in its own sealed chamber of his psyche, never bleeding into the others. It’s a system that has worked flawlessly for decades.

Until Marcus Edwards decides to destroy it all.

Edwards’s father was Richard’s thirty-fourth target, eliminated fifteen years ago in what should have been just another sanitized operation. But Edwards has spent five years planning his revenge — not a quick death, but systematic psychological warfare designed to shatter Richard’s carefully constructed compartments before killing him slowly.

As his dahlias are vandalised, his personal life disintegrates, and his carefully maintained covers begin to crumble, Richard faces an opponent who understands him better than he understands himself. Edwards knows Richard’s patterns, his vulnerabilities, his methods. And he’s orchestrated a trap that will force Richard to confront what he’s truly become over three decades of sanctioned killing.

In the shadows between corporate boardrooms and covert operations, between beauty and brutality, between the man Richard pretends to be and the weapon he’s always been, a lethal game of hunter and hunted reaches its inevitable, violent conclusion.

Some transformations can’t be undone. Some hunts never truly end.