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

When he returned home, he discovered Rhys hadn’t returned. The hours turned to days and, with it, the raw, painful truth. He was gone, forever. Ian grieved him like a man possessed, tearing apart Rhys’s bedroom, screaming his name. He didn’t stop until his throat ached, and his hands were bloody, stunned into submission by the discovery of the photos he’d found. Exhausted and heaving for breath, Ian sank to the floor, unaware of the truth he held in his hand. One that laid twisted in the lines of an adolescent boy’s smiling face, his innocence, taunting him with their shared destiny. A collision course he’d never be able to outrun.


Adam awoke, unaware of how long he’d been asleep, but as soon as his eyes opened, he suspected something was amiss. He reached out for Ian, expecting to find him, but found the other side of the mattress empty and cold. In a panic, Adam bolted upward, scrambling for the bedside lamp, assuming Ian had left. Instead, he sat at the edge of the bed.


Chapter 82