Andrew Hollister knew the wounds that make a person the most vulnerable couldn’t be seen. That last mission punched his ticket home. He’d survived when most of his team hadn’t. The physical damage had mended. The mental injuries hadn’t healed as easily. Hell, they hadn’t healed at all.

David Xavier - and all those he loved or counted as friends - would forever be mouth-watering targets to men of evil intent. His wealth could settle a small country's foreign debt. Because of this, from the moment of his birth, his mother obscured his identity. Reborn as the man named Gabriel, however, he walked free into a world where the innocents and the weak cried out for a defender, for the hand of justice, for a guardian angel.

In the Shadow World, he was the god of death, and he was called many names. The monsters he hunted called him Anubis. Those who saw his face died. To Guardian Security, he was a number - a surgical weapon they wielded against monstrous evil. One woman called him Kaeden Lang. Anubis never meant her to be anything except an interlude - a moment of light in the darkness of his life, a one-time escape from the ever-present haze of death.

The CIA didn’t care if Agent Victoria Marshal lived or died in an Afghani hell-hole. Yet, she survived each torture session with single-minded determination, but human flesh has its limits. She knew her time was running short. Jacob King led a privately funded black ops group into that Afghani village to gather intelligence. He didn’t expect to find an American woman. He admired her brave humor in the face of her agonizing injuries. This kind of tough-minded woman was someone Jacob wanted to know, so he asked her for a date…same time, next year.

Alone, isolated from the vast resources of Guardian, Dixon Simmons reentered a world that had left him impossibly damaged as a child. He stepped back into that evil by choice. To protect all he’d come to love, he was willing to pay whatever price was demanded — even if the price was his soul. She went by many names. Her true identity was as dead as her heart. Until him. The man was every bit as lethal as she was and deliciously sexy. Dixon Simmons piqued her interest, and what started as lust turned into another “L” word. She gave a “forever after” with him no hope.