The Aries Template
By Miles Ashbourne
When you hunt a killer together, the danger isn't just from the zodiac.
Detective Liam Foster has spent three years building walls around his grief. Since losing his partner Marcus to an unsolved murder, he's channeled everything into his cases and nothing into himself—no connection, no risk, no trust in federal interference. When a brutally posed body appears at Seattle's Pike Place Market, positioned like a Renaissance masterpiece with a zodiac symbol painted in blood, Liam recognizes the particular weight of a case that will demand everything he has left to give.
FBI profiler Dr. Adrian Vega arrives with exhausted eyes, a leather notebook, and an uncanny ability to read crime scenes like emotional landscapes. Liam wants to dismiss him as another federal agent here to take credit. But Adrian's first observation—that they're looking at the opening of a twelve-victim zodiac cycle—proves devastatingly accurate. Two men defined by loss, forced to work in proximity under impossible pressure, circling something neither is ready to name.
The kills accelerate. The staging grows bolder. A taunting message appears at a crime scene: Do you even know who you're looking for? When the killer breaks into Liam's apartment and leaves a painting depicting both investigators as future victims, the professional becomes terrifyingly personal. Suddenly Adrian needs protection, and Liam's apartment becomes their shared sanctuary—proximity stripping away every carefully maintained defense.
Grief recognizes grief. These are two men fluent in the language of loss, who spent years convincing themselves solitude was safety. Working together, sleeping under the same roof, trading confessions over midnight coffee—the walls are crumbling. But the killer is watching them both. Falling for Adrian might be the most dangerous thing Liam has ever done.
A forced-proximity, hurt-comfort MM romantic thriller featuring Seattle rain, Renaissance murder tableaux, and two damaged detectives finding each other in the dark.
