Whiteout Protocol

The story was supposed to destroy careers-not get Theo Reyes killed.

Investigative sports journalist Theo Reyes has spent years learning one rule: evidence is safer than people. So when his investigation uncovers a doping syndicate powerful enough to bury athletes, ruin reputations, and make inconvenient questions disappear, Theo does what he has always done. He keeps digging.

Then someone tries to kill him.

With nowhere safe left to go, Theo is smuggled into the Wyoming backcountry and placed under the protection of Jonah Whitfield, a disgraced former Olympic skier turned rescue pilot who wants nothing to do with reporters, scandals, or the outside world. Jonah is controlled, infuriatingly quiet, and frighteningly competent in a wilderness where one wrong decision can be fatal. Theo is restless, suspicious, and incapable of leaving a locked door unopened.

Neither man is what the other wants.

But as remote cabins disappear beneath snow, communication with the outside world becomes dangerous, and signs emerge that their pursuers have followed them into the mountains, survival forces Theo to rely on the one thing he trusts least: another person.

Jonah has spent a decade building a life where nobody can use him again. Protecting Theo should be simple-keep him alive, stay detached, finish the job. Except Theo keeps looking past Jonah's silence. He notices the things no one is supposed to notice: the supplies stocked before they're needed, the fire rebuilt before dawn, the steady hands that never hesitate when danger gets close.

And Theo is becoming harder to think of as just someone Jonah has to protect.

As the conspiracy tightens around them and the Wyoming winter turns increasingly unforgiving, suspicion gives way to reluctant trust, trust becomes something dangerously intimate, and the line between protecting someone and needing them begins to disappear.

Because the men hunting Theo aren't giving up.

And on a mountain where isolation can be either sanctuary or death sentence, Theo and Jonah may have to decide whether trusting each other is the greatest risk they've taken-or the only reason either of them will survive.