Hide and Hollow

He came to the mountain to disappear. She came to die quietly. The winter had other plans.

For four years, Gage Maddox has lived alone in a single cabin at seven thousand feet, in a hollow so remote the cold forgets how to carry sound. He chose the silence. He built the distance with surgical precision—because the last time he let himself get close to another person, he killed them.

Then a woman appears in the rotting cabin half a mile south. Connecticut plates. No winter gear. She burns her stove too hot and wastes her kindling on damp wood. And one January morning, there's no smoke.

Vera Sinclair drove west until the road ran out, running from a man who spent two years teaching her that her own reality was wrong—and from what she did the night she finally fought back. She came to the mountains to become nothing. To take up no space. To vanish.

Gage pulls her out of the snow with hours to live. And winter slams the door behind them both.

One cabin. One bed. One stove. Forty below, and thirty-one miles of impassable mountain between them and anywhere. Two survivors with the same secret carved into their hands, circling each other in a world of white silence—a silent, dangerous man who keeps a careful three inches between his hands and everyone else, and a hypervigilant woman who wakes up counting exits.

But the past doesn't stay buried under the snowpack. Somewhere east, a powerful man with money and a grudge is following the tracks Vera thought she'd erased. And when he comes up the buried road to take her back, the hollow that hid them becomes the place where everything is decided.

Hide and Hollow is a slow-burn survival dark romance about two broken people who came to disappear and got found instead—cold, fierce, and ultimately tender, for readers who like their love stories morally grey and their heroes one bad day from the edge.