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

Still, Allison’s face beckoned him to reconsider. For her, a voice within drove home. He had to be strong for Allison, his mother. He had to protect them, regardless of the cost. Secure knowing that somewhere in the world beyond this hell, they continued, safe. For that alone, Adam might have agreed to cut out his heart. But not someone else’s.


“This isn’t who I am—” He tried anew, but Ian dismissed his attempts.


“I know, but it has to be. Do you understand me? You have no choice, Adam.”


Adam searched Ian’s worried expression. What he’d hoped to find there he wasn’t sure, but he clung to it, secreting it away in the depths of himself—the faint glimpse of fear below the surface. A glint of truth which Adam anchored himself with, resigned to his fate.


“You have to,” Ian stressed, teeth gritted. “Now, don’t make me repeat myself.”


Chapter 49