On the sun-scorched wastes of the frontier world Iradia, the heat can kill…but the secrets are even deadlier. Miala Fels had one goal: bleed the Mast crime syndicate dry. But when a rival's ambush leaves her target's caravan a graveyard of burning chrome and broken bodies, her revenge goes up in smoke. In the wreckage, she finds a single survivor: Eryk Thorn, the syndicate's most lethal enforcer, and the man who personifies everything Miala hates. She should leave him to die. Instead, she drags him from the sand. Miala needs a blade, and Thorn needs a reason to live. She offers him a cold-blooded deal: his protection for a share of his dead master's hidden fortune. But as she nurses him back to health, the friction of their forced alliance sparks a different kind of fire. In the intimate heat of desert nights, the line between enemy and lover blurs — and Miala realizes too late that she hasn't just rescued a mercenary. She's invited a predator into her bed…and walked away from that desert carrying a secret that will bind her to Eryk Thorn far longer than any bargain. Because when their past finally catches up with them, it won't be a fortune on the line. It'll be everything they never admitted they'd built.