CODE NAME: HORNET
Releasing March 27, 2025
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Secrets and loyalty kept them apart.
Vengeance brought them together.
Survival will test their love.
HORNET
As a newly promoted agent in the ultra-secretive Unit 23, I thought I’d seen it all. But when my mentor is abducted and Kima goes missing on my watch, my world turns upside down. Suddenly, I’m thrust into a high-stakes game of betrayal and revenge with the woman I secretly love at its center.
I’ve spent months hiding my feelings for Kima, keeping her at arm’s length to protect us both. But as we unravel a web of lies that leads back to her supposedly dead stepfather, I realize I can’t lose her again. With danger closing in from all sides, I have to choose between my duty and my heart. And in this deadly game, one wrong move could cost us everything.
DELFINO
I thought I knew pain when I lost my beloved stepfather. I was wrong. Finding out he’s alive—and a traitor—shattered my world. Now, all I can think about is making him pay for his betrayal.
As a skilled intelligence agent, I’m used to working alone. But when Hornet, the man I’ve loved for months, finally admits his feelings for me, everything changes. He wants me to let go of my vendetta, but I can’t. Instead, I ask him to help me exact my revenge.
Together, we’ll navigate a dangerous world of secrets and lies, risking it all to uncover the truth. But as we delve deeper into this deadly conspiracy, I begin to wonder: how much am I willing to sacrifice for vengeance? And can our newfound love survive the storm that’s coming?
1
Hornet
No sign of forced entry. Security cams disabled. Kima’s cell phone sitting on the counter in the kitchen. Bed made. Clothes and other personal items gone.
Every clue pointed to the woman whose life I was responsible for guarding leaving of her own volition.
Why? I repeated the word out loud. What was I missing? There had to be a clue somewhere in this bloody flat.
I sat in the kitchen, rested my elbows on the counter, and put my head in my hands. There was more to it than simply being responsible for Kima’s life. I loved her. I’d never acted on it, of course, given my boss—the man who’d become like a father to her after hers died—had warned me repeatedly to stay away from her. We both knew it had nothing to do with being her bodyguard. He meant personally.
Given he was the commander of Unit 23, one of the deadliest assassins who’d ever lived, could level me in ten seconds flat, and a man I respected more than any other outside my own father, I’d listened. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done since Kima, the missing woman, made it clear on several occasions that she felt the same way I did in secret.
I’d never confessed my true feelings to her or anyone else. Rebuffing her advances was equally painful for me when I’d see the hurt in her eyes and her humiliation when I told her I didn’t feel that way about her. Who wouldn’t be affected, knowing they were causing that kind of pain to someone they loved?
Recently, Kima had pulled away from everyone in her life after learning the man who’d adopted her as young child, the man she believed was dead, wasn’t. Worse, he was a double agent and on the run now that he’d been exposed as faking his own death.
I’d watched Kima’s idolization of him turn to hate in an instant. She and I were both intelligence officers; me for His Majesty’s Secret Service and her as part of a UN coalition against human trafficking. Knowing there was a traitor in our midst—in her family—was a pain worse than death. That, coupled with the devastation she and her mother had felt for the past eleven years, missing him, mourning him, and wishing more than anything that he hadn’t been killed in action, added to the devastation she’d felt after learning of his betrayal.
The idea that she might’ve turned to him, and that was the reason she’d left, wasn’t a possibility. She abhorred him.
I sat up straight and my eyes opened wide when the realization of where Kima was hit me.
She planned to kill him, which meant finding him. Given that meant walking into imperilment, it was exponentially more likely she’d die first.
