Rufus O’Callaghan has eked out a living on the streets of New York City by helping the police put away criminals as a confidential informant. But when Rufus shows up for an arranged meeting and finds his handler dead, his already-uncertain life is thrown into a tailspin. Now someone is trying to kill Rufus too, and he’s determined to find out why. After leaving the Army under less than desirable circumstances, Sam Auden has drifted from town to town, hitching rides and catching Greyhounds, until he learns that a former Army buddy, now a police detective in New York City, has died by suicide. Sam knows that’s not right, and he immediately sets out to get answers. As Rufus and Sam work together to learn the truth of their friend’s death, they find themselves entangled in a web of lies, cover-ups, and accelerating danger. And when they witness a suspect killed in cold blood, they realize they’re running out of time.

After solving the mystery behind the death of his former friend in July, ex-Army Sam Auden has been aimlessly wandering the country. Everything had gone sideways in New York City, so when his phone rings three months later, the caller is the last person Sam expected to be asking for help. Confidential informant Rufus O’Callaghan has been struggling. His NYPD contact was murdered over the summer, and the man Rufus is head over heels for was driven away by his own undiagnosed trauma. But when he receives an anonymous letter that promises information on his mother, life goes from dark to dangerous in the blink of an eye. Sam and Rufus must dig into Rufus’s rough and turbulent past in order to solve a series of contemporary murders connected to his mother. And if the two can’t expose who the killer is in time, they will most certainly become his next targets.

It’s winter in New York City, and Rufus O’Callaghan is trying to make things work. He’s still got his job as a confidential informant, and he’s still got Sam Auden. The ex-Army drifter has moved in with Rufus, and the two men are trying to build a lasting relationship as Sam struggles to find his footing in the city. When Sam gets a call from a woman offering to sell him information about Project Stonefish, though, neither man knows what to make of it. Sam still has questions about the training operation that caused him to leave the Army—and that ended in the death of someone Sam cared about. And Rufus is all too aware that when it comes to Stonefish, Sam’s judgment might be in question. Everything changes when Sam and Rufus learn that the woman who called Sam has died from a suspicious overdose—and that, before she died, she contacted someone else about Stonefish. Someone who wants Stonefish to stay buried in the past. Someone with the power—and the ruthlessness—to make sure it stays buried. And to learn the truth about what happened all those years ago, Sam and Rufus will have to place themselves in the crosshairs.