In the next book in this New York Times best-selling series, Evan Smoak takes on his most complex mission yet―one where he not only has to protect but also avenge, and find a way to balance vengeance with mercy.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Antihero by Gregg Hurwitz, which releases on February 10th 2026.
Once a black ops assassin for the government known as Orphan X, Evan Smoak broke with the program and went deep underground, using his operational rules and skills to help the truly desperate with nowhere else to turn.
When Luke Devine, one of the most powerful men in the world, has a psychological crisis, Evan flies to the East Coast to help him. While there, he learns of a young woman who was kidnapped off the New York City subway, clearly in danger and in need of aid. With no name and few clues, Evan and his team track down the missing woman, who was assaulted and abandoned. Evan offers his help―and sets out finding the young men responsible. But the woman insists that Evan abandon his usual methods―no vengeance and, in particular, no killing. Which will prove no easy feat given the mounting incoming threats from all sides. In a mission that takes Evan from coast to coast, from the poorest corners of society to the richest, Orphan X must figure out a way to protect the innocent, avenge the victimized, and balance justice with a measure of mercy.
3
The Parity of All Thoughts
A mother with children.
That’s who you look for first.
The second choice is a couple with kids.
Third: a woman, alone.
You need to pay attention for when it starts to happen.
Rich taste of copper. That’s how it begins for me. Then the taste turns into colors and colors into taste, which sounds completely weird but when it happens it makes perfect sense. Dark greens swirl into cobalt and indigo, and then needles sparkle through my brain, a brilliant ticklish pain, and then my thoughts go horizontal, all of them perfectly equal and weightless. The fanged premonition that this will finally be the time I won’t come out of it holds the same non-weight in my mind as the gum stuck to the subway seat across from me. The parity of all thoughts is a delirious release.
And right after that? It takes me out.
As the train rolls and rattles me through the intestines of Manhattan, I clutch the laminated oversize index card to my belly. I have it looped around my neck already and I’ve used yarn for the lanyard instead of string since string almost choked me out once when it caught around my throat. Now I make sure there’s plenty of extra yarn for a loose fit.
In my not-terrible handwriting, the first line on the index card reads:
Please help me.
It is all I have to ward off evil—purse snatchers, the fury of my nervous system, the stainless-steel curve of the hand pole three feet from my left temple.
Fourth choice is a man with children.
Fifth—a pack of girls, preferably working-class.
No matter how hard I try to reduce my vulnerability within myself and before the world, it is unavoidable. Reminders are everywhere, in the backup stack of laminated index cards on my office desk in the church basement, in the way I constantly catalog faces of strangers, in how I clutch my backpack in my lap right now, the pillow inside stuffed atop my work files for easy access.
I’m twenty-five but I look no older than nineteen, which I don’t say with vanity (because I’m still too young to care to look younger). I say it because a nineteen-year-old-looking girl is at even greater risk when she must trust herself to the charity of the world.
My father named me Anca, which means “merciful grace,” because his heart broke wide open at the first sight of me. Imagine how fortunate I am to play this role in our family mythos. Wreathed in smoke from the Pall Mall riding his gesticulations, Tată used to puff himself up big when he told it, full-hearted in his Orthodox Christian chest. How he loved the tiny parentheticals of my knuckles. My impossibly diminutive toes. My light blue eyes.
I’m dark-skinned, which isn’t as rare for Romanians as you might think. We are descended from Romans and surrounded by Slavs, so we have all the passion of Italians with Russian defeatism sprinkled atop. Depending on who you ask, we are either optimistic pessimists or pessimistic optimists, though Tată definitely belongs to the latter category. Our family has a hint of Asian somewhere back from all the cross-continent invasions, Genghis Khan and the Ottomans and whatnot. Plus us Southerners are just a stone’s throw to East Asia, so who knows who got up to what. In Tată’s eyes, I was a great beauty, but I know I am merely pretty-with-some-effort (Tată also taught me to be mindful of humility).
All the more miracle, his love for me, is that I came at the expense of his greatest love. Obstructed labor, the impossible choice—her or me. Together they chose me. In her dying moment, Mamă chose me.
The blessing of that. And the further blessing that my father viewed my creation as a painful miracle he would honor, this immaculate conception of another type—a daughter born from purity.
That gives me something to live up to every day, however imperfectly.
When I was no more than a year old, my father brought us across the world to the affordable Bronx. His great American hopes never materialized, not in the way he hoped, but he kept a roof over our heads and I never once wanted for food and he held on against the dark spots in his lungs until I graduated high school and finished a year at Mercy College.
He was so strong. That wrenching cough rattling the bathroom walls when he thought I was already asleep. The rust-speckled balls of Kleenex. The coats that hung costume-like on his diminished frame. He stayed for me until three days after my eighteenth birthday. Until I was a legal adult able to get a job and keep our roof over my head. He did that for me, shouldered all that pain for love and duty.
The sixth choice is an elderly man.
Seventh is two females.
Past seven the rankings blur together. At that point, it’s up to how much kindness you sense in people’s eyes.
The 2 line keeps rocketing north, shaving beneath Central Park. A sketchy stretch, my least favorite. I chose this particular car because it was crowded when I got on in Brooklyn, but by now the passengers have thinned out, my options dwindling. From what I can see on the snaking turns, the neighboring cars are empty too, but I’m not too worried because there’s a girl about my age sitting across from me. A micromini skirt shows a whole lot of her body. She has chewed-down nails and wears too much makeup and looks a bit lost but her eyes are soft and soulful and the way she sits with the heels of her hands jammed to the seat at her sides, her elbows locked, and her shoulders jabbed up by her ears makes her seem fragile. I am grateful to have an Option Three.
As always I am dressed modestly, a winter coat over my shirtdress with long sleeves. The floral pattern sets tiny lilies against a cornflower-blue background. I am coming back from visiting Ioana, an elder from our parish who lives all the way out in Brownsville. It’s a bit of a trial for me to get home but it’s a broken hip and she cannot get out to the grocery shop and no one else volunteered. I started out after Vespers so it was late to begin with and we all know Ioana needs care and conversation. Despite the complexities that govern my existence, the church has trusted me to be director of social services and that is a responsibility I honor as best as I humanly can.
At the moment it’s a bit past midnight. The last-gen subway car is torn up from the crime surge, one of the harvest-orange seats shattered jaggedly into plastic fangs. Across the ceiling ads curves unimaginative graffiti—a giant dick, a floating pair of boobs, and a street tag that resembles bird-shit splatter. With matching black spray paint, the dome casings of the embedded security cameras have been turned opaque, the tang of shellac still heavy in the unvented air. The cabin lights are flickering on and off too, a quicker strobe than that of the passing stations, and I reassure myself that the lighting change indeed originates from the subway and not inside my head.
We stop at 116th Street. Most everyone else clears off and then it’s just me, Option Three, and a passed-out meth-head at the far end. Even over the roar of the train, I can make out raucous laughter in the trailing car. A hyena pack of young men.
A group of young men is always the Last Option.
I look down.
Beneath Please help me resides the second line, which serves as a caption.
My Seizure Plan.
My condition urges me to hold perennial humility and for that I am grateful despite how challenging everything else can be.
Don’t be scared, the next line pleads.
I get up to two seizures a day.
They last between one and three minutes.
Then I list the basics. Lay me on my side. Keep me away from sharp objects. Please don’t call an ambulance—I can’t afford it. I’ll be awake soon! Please stay with me until I’m back inside myself.
I still debate over the sole exclamation mark in case it seems manipulative instead of merely comforting, which is my intent.
Despite all the instructions on the laminated card, my true asks are really prayers: Please guard over me. Please show me charity. Please have mercy on me.
The voices from the car behind grow louder. Amused howls mixed with chanting. The mood, were I to guess, is lubricated with alcohol.
Despite Option Three right across from me, I cannot risk being stuck with the Last Option if the young men decide to switch cars. I’m just readying to rise and move on when I taste it.
Copper.
Rich and hot, melted pennies.
An initial flurry of panic claws its way up my throat but I’m practiced enough to soothe it back down. I’m safe in this moment and I have my laminated index card and my pillow in my backpack and an Option Three.
I do however need to act fast.
As I gesture to catch the young woman’s attention, I’m already tasting colors, but they’re still light yellows and golds, so I have a few moments.
“Are you staying on the train?” I try to keep the note of pleading out of my voice.
She sweeps aside blond tresses of blown-out hair to unscrew an AirPod. “Huh?” Her eyes move to the laminated card, which I’m holding up dumbly like a jail placard. “Wait—seizures? Like, seizure-seizures? Okay, okay. Are you having one now?”
“No.” I pull my pillow out of my backpack. “Any second.”
Option Three swings herself across the aisle of the moving train and plops down next to me, giving her micromini a practiced tuck beneath her thighs. She plucks the laminated index card from my hand, scanning it. Her eyebrows are high. She hums with anxiety.
“It’s okay.” I rest a calming hand on her forearm. “I’ll be okay.”
I set my backpack on the floor at my feet. Folding the soft pillow, I rest it on the seat to my right and lie down, nestling my head in its cushion. The dome of the security camera looms sightless overhead, blotted out with spray paint.
The greens come on now but they still taste light—celery and chartreuse.
“Can you . . .” My mind-mouth connection blinks out but then comes back online. “. . . stay with me?”
“How long?” Nervous chattering. “I have to get off to catch the Metro-North. I’m sorry—it’s a—There’s a helicopter waiting for me in Westchester I can’t miss. I have to—Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Umm, hang on.” I breathe heavily, my head going slurry. “If it gets really bad”—now kelly and sage burst across my palate—“can you roll me onto the floor?” It all seems so ridiculous, the gleaming poles and marigold seats and the terrible lighting that makes my teeth ache. “And if you have to go, would you mind finding someone else”—the taste grows ominously darker, emerald and fern—“who seems kind?”
Somewhere deep inside I’m registering danger but it’s just a fact like every other fact. I sort through the sludge of sensation until I zero in on the threat: the chanting from the car behind us. Louder now, accompanied with thumping. The young men are stomping their feet. My thoughts veer zoological—images of baying and hooves, predatory displays and bone-crushing jaws.
All at once the subway brakes screech hellishly. The cabin lights dim and flicker and we are coasting through subterranean semidarkness and I am trying to say, Please can you stay with me one more stop, but my words aren’t working anymore and now I’m tasting forest and olive.
Option Three crouches before me. “I’m sorry, sweetie. If it was literally any other time I’d wait with you but the helicopter’ll leave without me and—and I can’t afford to—”
She’s clutching my seizure plan and her eyes are wide and I can see beneath the fake lashes and the crust of her mascara how pretty she is even without all that glamming up. But her eyes are party-drug glazed in a way I hadn’t noticed before and I can see she isn’t thinking clearly and that makes two of us and the brakes are screaming and the boots stomping in the trailing car grow louder.
Her face contorts with regret and for an instant I see straight into her. She is racked with guilt and uncertainty. She is fighting within herself and I pray the right side will win but now the greens are bleeding into blues which means I’m nearly out of time.
Please don’t leave me, I don’t—can’t—say.
She rubs my forehead gently, not knowing that makes the needles in my brain prickle all the more. “I have to go. You’ll be okay, sweetie. I promise. Someone’ll come. Someone else’ll take care of you.”
And I feel her shove my laminated index card between my back and the seat so it sticks up. The subway brakes grind away and the pale yellow light of the station ahead beams ever stronger. Lying down, I cannot see the platform but I pray that more people will get on, that even at this late hour the seats around me will fill with families or Good Samaritans.
We shudder into the glaring light and the doors jolt open.
I look at Option Three and form the thought again through the brilliant skewers inside my mind: Please help me.
She gets up, hesitates. She is having second thoughts. The doors are still holding open and she hasn’t left and my heart readies itself to leap with relief.
She leans forward and kisses me on the temple, feather-soft. Her breath is pot and bubble gum: “I’m sorry. You’re good. You’ll be okay. Someone else’ll watch over you.”
Behind me I hear the intercar door bang open on its hinges, lifting the volume on the roar of merriment from the trailing car. As my eyes strain to see what is coming, she says brightly, “See, people are here now.”
In a blink, she drifts backward, skimming through the bumpers onto the 125th Street platform. My frozen view stays locked on the doors and her face in the window. As she glances at the men in my blind spot, I see a single note of dismay on her face, furling the tiny spot between her eyebrows. She fades away as I lurch forward again and sapphire leaks along the sides of my tongue and I am touched with exquisite pain and the anticipation of release.
Midnight blue spills through my mouth. My brain sparkles. I feel human presence behind me, the heat and clamor of the pack, and all at once a chilling silence fills the car as I am noticed.
A clank as something drops. And then it rolls into view before my paralyzed face.
A can of black spray paint.
There comes a stir of excitement, yips of delight, and then a voice wrenched high with malice proclaims, “Lookee lookee. What have we here?”
Before the last streaking lights in my head wobble into darkness, I have time for a single last thought.
Please don’t let the hyenas get me.
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