At seven years old, a boy stood at a gate beside his father. His father signed a contract — ten years of the boy's life, handed to a master he had just met. Then his father walked away.

For the next decade the boy trained before dawn and long past dark, in a school so brutal that the contract itself forgave the master if a student died. He learned to fall, to fight, to endure. What he did not learn was who his parents really were.

Because his gentle mother and his quiet father — the cook, the housewife — had lived a life before him that they would keep hidden for forty years. When the truth finally came, it rewrote everything the boy thought he knew about the people who gave him away.

The name is revealed only at the final page. See if you can guess before the end.

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