He spent fifteen years believing the violence stayed on the battlefield—until it followed him home.

Lieutenant Colonel Gibson Styles lives between two worlds: career soldier and trauma surgeon at Rouge Valley. For years, he’s clung to one fragile certainty, that the horrors he’s seen overseas will never touch his life in Toronto. Then comes the call no one who loves Madison Davis ever wants to receive.

Madison is a forensic specialist whose testimony has helped put some of the city’s most dangerous predators behind bars. But when convicted rapist Patrick Gangy escapes a prison transport, he comes after the woman who helped take his freedom.

Kidnapped, drugged, and seven months pregnant, Madison is hidden in a frozen, abandoned campground in Beaverton. Her life, and their unborn child’s, hangs by a thread.

With time running out, Gibson trades surgical discipline for tactical instinct. Aided by a friend and colleague, a Cormorant rescue pilot, he launches a desperate mission into the woods to bring Madison home.

But saving her is only the first battle.

As Madison fights to recover and their premature daughter clings to life in the Sunnybrook NICU, Gibson faces the one wound he can’t stitch closed: the fear that has kept Madison from marrying him. For years, she refused his proposals, terrified of becoming a soldier’s widow. Now, staring at their fragile daughter through the glass, the irony is brutal.

It wasn’t the soldier who almost didn’t come home.

Survival brought them back to each other. Healing may tear them apart. Can Gibson mend the heart of a woman too afraid to stay—or has Madison finally lost too much to love without fear?