Sebastian Stark just isn’t cut out for normal life with a girlfriend in the hot and humid city of Miami. All in all, he’d rather be back on the island where it was just the two of them, and he could keep everything in balance. The bar down the street tempts him daily, but he’s determined to remain strong. Adjusting to normal life is difficult, but Bastian is doing his best to keep himself together and the nightmares away. Raine’s happy, and that’s what matters to him the most. But not all nightmares can be driven away. When Bastian’s former mentor comes into the picture and presents him with an ultimatum, Bastian slips into old habits. Though he wants to shield Raine from the truth, the shady circumstances of his past form into a hurricane he can’t control. In an effort to protect her, Bastian has no choice but to throw himself back into his old job – death match tournaments – just one last time. Dropped into the arctic wilderness with weapons loaded, Bastian has to compete against representatives from major crime lords all over the states. He’s studied his competition, he knows their weaknesses, and he’s ready to battle for the woman he loves. There’s only one opponent in the mix that causes him any concern. In order to guarantee Raine’s safety, Bastian will be pitted against the key hit man for Chicago’s largest mob family – a guy who’s known as one hell of a shot. A guy named Evan Arden

After Evan Arden was imprisoned by the enemy for a year and a half, he returned from the desert as a military hero. He’d suffered some minor injuries during his captivity, was discharged from the Marines with just a touch of shellshock, but was considered otherwise unharmed. Now he wonders how he ended up where he is now – incarcerated in Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center for using his sharpshooting expertise to take out the neighborhood park with a high-powered sniper rifle and multiple rounds of ammunition. Lia Antonio, the woman he rescued from the desert heat the previous year, is the only person who can bring him out of his sleep-deprived psychosis and mounting PTSD. When she does, Evan knows he can’t just let her go again. He’s never considered leaving the business before – who retires from the mafia? – but he’s determined to get both Lia and himself out of harm’s way. Evan faces forces from multiple directions as a deal to get him out of jail turns more deadly and dangerous than he ever could have imagined. With a three-way mob war on the horizon and the feds holding evidence over his head, Evan has no choice but to throw himself into the middle of another war-zone. In his efforts to make things right in his own mind, Evan crosses the wrong man and finds himself on the business end of the cross-hairs. With his observation skills and intelligence, he tries to keep a step ahead of his former co-workers, but this time, it isn’t just his own life on the line – he’s got to protect Lia from the man who once called him son