While young doctor Adam Morrow resigns himself to an uninformed existence, world-weary assassin Ian Abbott struggles with a life he never asked for. When the two strangers meet by chance, the attraction is immediate. And deadly, as Adam walks in on Ian in the middle of a hit. The situation spirals out of control once Ian discovers he and Adam share a connection far more profound than either imagined. Shocked by the discovery, Ian makes the hasty decision to kidnap him. Overnight Adam is torn from his promising career and a family who believes him dead. Things go from bad to worse when he finds himself reunited with a mother he never knew who is now head of a covert and shadowy group of killers for hire. Forced into joining their ranks, with Ian as his reluctant trainer and handler, Adam is given a series of impossible tasks to complete. To survive, he must fight with everything he has to keep his life, his sanity, and his very soul from being swept up in a violent and chaotic world even as he battles his unwanted and complicated feelings for Ian. For his part Ian, a man with dark secrets of his own, has a past he isn't ready to share with Adam even as the other man worms into his life in more ways than one. The two grow closer and lines blur -- between good and evil, friend or foe, enemy or lover. But something, or someone, plots against them, determined to do everything in their power to keep them apart. Even if it means destroying them both.

The Dead Don't Lie

Adam dragged his eyes open, testing out limbs that declined to cooperate, unable to move a muscle. Horrified, he came awake with a frightful start. His body snapped forward, and he was astonished to find himself handcuffed to a chair bolted to the floor, still dressed in his tux. He jerked against his constraints, crying out as sharp metal bit into his skin, making him bleed.


Adam’s attention flew in the voice’s direction, located somewhere in the room’s dark. There Ian stood off to the side, arms crossed over his chest, studying him with hooded, unreadable eyes.


The room they were in was little more than a windowless cell, stripped of furnishings, save the chair—the entire place from floor to ceiling stark, featureless and gray.


“You lying piece of shit! What the hell is this?” Adam continued tugging against restraints that refused to budge. In despair, he slumped forward, groaning in helpless frustration at the exertion.


Chapter 26