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

On the second night, he still couldn’t sleep, their living quarters too hot and stuffy. The windowless rooms were making him even more claustrophobic than usual. He stumbled outside to the secluded back gardens, dressed only in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. He wandered over to his chosen bench, but someone else had beaten him to it.


Ian glanced up, climbing to his feet as Adam approached. “What are you doing out here?”


“What are youdoing out here?” Adam countered.


“I needed some air,” Ian answered as he shifted from one foot to the other, shoulders squared.


“Where have you been?” Adam stepped closer, sniffing the air, catching the lingering odor of cigarettes and someone else’s obnoxious cologne. Adam’s stomach somersaulted, overcome by a surge of jealousy as he put two and two together.


“Around,” Ian shrugged and tried to step past him.


Chapter 72