John Reese had a secret.

Not the secret of his name or his birth or his past. Those things were easy enough to keep hidden.

This secret was different; it was the thing that had the potential to make him weak, but it was also what made him strong. Whenever he wished he could escape it, he recalled the men and women he had known who had managed to do so, and he knew he didn't want to be one of them.

Harold shared his secret, of course, though they never talked about it. It was the strongest thread binding the two of them together, so strong it never needed to be articulated.

The secret John Reese both cherished and hated was his love.

He loved them all, all the people behind the numbers. He loved the unfortunate girls with the male stalkers, the children whose parents' bad decisions put them in harm's way, the men without jobs. He even loved the would-be criminals.

Love made him hit hard, hold tight, listen without interrupting. The job he had once done from other motivations—misguided patriotism, a sense of duty, perhaps—he now did for a much more compelling reason. He did it because he cared for every one of the faces.

It wasn't about atonement. Reese knew he could never make up for the things he had done in another life. They were finished, their damage complete. But that didn't mean he couldn't save the others from hurting or being hurt. In the end, it was the same, whether you were the one or the other. He knew all about that; he'd been in front of the gun and behind it. The damage wasn't all that different.

Angela Guitierrez watched her savior walk away, past the groups of lawyers and cops and out the door of the courthouse, a hero with the gentlest eyes she'd ever seen.

Angela didn't think about angels much, but when she did, she thought of the picture in her grandmother's Bible of a muscular, winged man keeping Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden. An avenging angel with an angry face and cold, piercing eyes. She had never imagined that angels could be kind, and she hadn't known that a man with a fist could also be a man with a heart.

Not until she met John Reese.

Angela didn't realize that to evildoers, John was every bit as scary as the avenging angel from her childhood. She only saw the tenderness in his eyes when he looked at her and heard the kindness in his voice when he spoke her name.

She stood still as he walked away, remembering the protective warmth of his arms around her and smiling at the knowledge that once, for a short time, an angel had loved her.