Hollow Trace

In the backcountry, the only thing more dangerous than the truth is the girl he thought he’d buried.

Quinton Taylor knows the smell of a crime scene. As an RCMP officer and SAR tech, he’s seen the worst the wilderness can do—but he’s never seen a trail go this cold, this fast. When his sister vanishes, the only thing left behind is a high-tech biometric watch and the chilling certainty that the forest is watching him. But he isn’t just late to the party—he’s become the prey.

The ambush nearly takes his life. The rescue nearly shatters his mind.

Scout Lennox is a dead woman walking. Three months after Quinn attended her memorial—after they’d finally found their way back to one another—she’s standing over him in the dirt, armed to the teeth and operating in the shadows of a war he didn’t know was being waged. He wants answers. She just wants to keep him breathing long enough to find his sister.

The watch in Quinn’s hand is a death sentence. It’s pinging his sister’s vitals as she’s driven through a lethal selection process where only the “outliers” survive. To save her, Quinn must trust the ghost he never stopped missing. To stop a killer, Scout must risk letting Quinn get close—close enough to see the woman she’s become. But the deeper they push, the more dangerous the truth becomes… and the more impossible it is to keep their hands off each other when the only safe place left is the space between them.

Because this time, losing isn’t just death. And to survive, they’ll have to become the very thing Quinn spent his life fighting—people who exist outside the law.