Burn And Bounty - Undertow Sins, #7

"She asked me if I was the storm or the shelter. I told her I was the lock on the door, and she'd have to decide for herself whether it was keeping her safe or keeping her in."

Isolde "Izzy" Cross thought she was three hours away from vanishing. Framed for embezzling over four million dollars by her abusive, cartel-connected ex-husband, she's been on the run for five desperate weeks. But her escape is violently cut short when Mal Thane—a heavily scarred, terrifyingly disciplined bounty hunter—kicks down her motel room door and locks steel cuffs around her wrists.

Mal doesn't lose targets. He operates on rules, contracts, and a clinical detachment forged in classified military deployments. He intends to deliver Izzy to the courthouse and collect his fee. But Hurricane Delilah, a catastrophic Category 4 storm, has other plans.

With the only bridge to the mainland destroyed, Mal and Izzy are trapped inside a condemned, sweltering boarding house. As the storm surge rises through the floorboards and tears the building apart, they are forced into a suffocating, dark attic. In the terrifying intimacy of survival, the rigid lines between captor and captive begin to blur. Izzy realizes the dangerous man holding her prisoner might be the only one who can keep her alive, and Mal discovers that the "thief" he caught is a survivor worth burning his career for.

When the storm breaks, the real nightmare begins. A heavily armed hit squad arrives in the flooded wreckage, sent by Izzy's ex-husband to silence her permanently. Outnumbered and cut off from the world, Mal must make a choice: honor his contract, or unleash his lethal training to protect the woman he was supposed to ruin.