Vector Burn

By Miles Ashbourne

Six people are dead from a weapon that shouldn't exist. Two men who've finally found peace are about to lose everything—including each other.

ATF Agent Cassian Holt has spent years running toward danger. Now, six months into a hard-won domestic life on a Missouri property with his partner Jonah, he's learning the radical luxury of staying still—morning coffee on the porch, a German Shepherd in the sun, and someone who finally feels like home. When forensic pathologist Dr. Rhea Sato calls with three words—*It's a weapon*—that stillness shatters.

The bioterror investigation pulls Critical Trace into downtown St. Louis and straight into the orbit of CDC specialist Dr. Marcus Hale—brilliant, intense, and immediately attuned to Rhea in ways that complicate everything. But the real friction ignites between Cassian and Jonah. As federal machinery targets the wrong suspect, Jonah's gut screams that they're being played. Cassian follows protocol. Jonah follows instinct. And the fault line between them cracks wide open.

An engineered hemorrhagic fever virus. A venture capitalist with a dead man's switch. A cyberattack that blinds three million people to their own exposure. As the conspiracy metastasizes from a biotech networking event into coordinated biological warfare, every procedural disagreement becomes a ticking clock—and an innocent woman's freedom hangs on whether two partners can trust each other again before the city burns.

The investigation will end. The criminal will fall. But partnerships—professional and deeply personal—are fractured by exactly the kind of pressure this case applies. Cassian and Jonah built something rare together. The question isn't whether they survive the mission. It's whether they survive each other.

A slow-burn established-relationship MM romance thriller featuring forced separation, a procedural vs. instinct conflict, and a bioterror conspiracy with a beating heart beneath every clinical detail.