The Conflicted Bride

The Conflicted Bride

Rosie Winterbourne was trained to follow orders. But when Michael McCaffey-her closest friend and the one person who still knows who she was before intelligence work stripped the softness from her-is kidnapped in Libya, obedience becomes impossible.

Michael has vanished in the ruined town of El Habar, a place held together by hunger, gunfire and fear. He was trying to help Astrid, a Swedish nurse, reach Greta Maloof: a teenage jihadi bride caught in the brutal machinery of fanaticism. To the men hunting her, Greta is property, propaganda and proof. To Astrid, she is still a girl worth saving. To Rosie, she becomes the reason a rescue mission turns into something far more dangerous.

Rosie's search pulls her from Gibraltar into the shadows of North Africa, where a covert pipeline is moving European extremists back towards the West. At the centre of it stands Leviticus Danilenco: polished, brilliant and impossible to trust. He offers help with a smile, speaks in half-truths, and seems to know far more than any ally should. Russian intelligence, jihadist networks and Western secrets all coil around him like wire.

Rosie knows he is using her.

She may have to use him back.

Drawn aboard a Russian vessel bound for the Libyan coast, Rosie joins an uneasy rescue operation with motives buried beneath motives. Spetsnaz soldiers prepare for combat. Intelligence officers trade favours like ammunition. Leviticus hints at defection, betrayal and information that could tear open the people Rosie serves. Everyone wants something from El Habar. Not everyone intends to leave witnesses behind.

Inside the besieged town, the lines between victim, believer, rescuer and enemy begin to blur. Astrid's desperate hope of saving Greta collides with the reality of radicalisation. Michael's life hangs by a thread. Rosie is forced to make choices no training exercise could prepare her for, in a place where mercy can be fatal and loyalty is just another weapon.

The deeper she goes, the less certain she becomes of who is truly manipulating the mission. Is Leviticus a traitor, a survivor, or something worse? Are the Russians there to rescue their own, or to bury evidence? And why does every secret seem to point not only to Moscow and Daesh, but towards corruption closer to home?

Gritty, tense and morally bruising, The Conflicted Bride is an espionage thriller about friendship under fire, ideology without mercy, and the cost of stepping outside the rules. Rosie enters Libya determined to bring Michael home.

But war zones do not return people unchanged.