Under a Borrowed Name

About this book:

Clara Vance saw something she wasn't supposed to see in a hotel parking garage: Salvatore "The Hammer" Marcone execute a man in cold blood. Her testimony put a mob boss behind bars, but the price is her entire existence. In a single night, Clara Vance is incinerated—driver's license, social security number, childhood photos, even her hair color—and Nora Evans is born. Her only lifeline is Deputy U.S. Marshal Luke Mercer, a man who moves like a shadow and guards his secrets as fiercely as he guards her life.

They flee to Pine Ridge, a timber town of four hundred souls buried deep in the mountains, where the winter silence is broken only by the wind and the secrets the locals keep. Nora has a script to memorize: dead parents, a failed career, a modest inheritance, a dog named Barnaby. She has to be boring, unremarkable, invisible. But Marcone has five million reasons and a network of desperate men to find her, and in a town this small, a stranger who pays cash and asks no questions is the most interesting thing for miles.

As the snow piles high and the investigation into Marcone's remaining empire heats up, the line between protector and protected begins to blur. Luke knows every protocol for keeping a witness alive, but he never planned for the way Nora reads the silence between his words, or the way her borrowed name starts to feel like a cage they're both trapped in. When the past finally tracks them down through the pines, surviving will take more than a false identity—it will take trusting the one person who knows exactly who she used to be.