No Safe Haven in Red Hollow

by Cora Brooks

Heat 3 / 5Novella · 12 chapters29,345 words2h 8m read~3h 16m listen

Sage Ghent has been dead for two years. Not officially — just quietly, deliberately, wearing a borrowed name like a second skin and mopping floors at Red Hollow’s sheriff station while the Hollow syndicate runs its rot through the Appalachian dark. It’s a fragile kind of invisible. It works, until it doesn’t.

On a sleeting January night at the abandoned mill, Sage finds a manila envelope frozen into the catwalk grating — a marriage license, already filled out, pairing their forged name with that of federal operative Winter Pereira. Before the ink of that discovery can dry, Winter himself appears at the station, all lethal grin and quiet certainty, calling Sage by exactly the wrong name. He’s been hunting the mythic forger who ghosts witnesses out of Red Hollow. The trail ends here. With them.

Forced onto the road and into a ridge safehouse with a shadow squad of burned ex-cops and outlaws, Sage has to decide fast what’s more dangerous: the Hollow syndicate closing in, the family ultimatum demanding a coerced wedding by spring, or the way Winter keeps putting his body between Sage and every bullet aimed their way.

ProtectorSecond ChanceWitness ProtectionEnemies To LoversFound Family