She refused to leave without the children. He had a contract to bring her home alone.

Asher Reyes lost his faith in a chaplain's tent in Helmand and his brother on the road three months later. Now he extracts journalists for a paycheck and sleeps when he can. The Linden contract should have been forty-eight hours. A senator's sister. A clean ground exfil. No optics.

He finds Mara Linden in the basement of a bombed-out convent in northeast Africa, with five orphaned children clinging to her like she is the last warm thing in their world. The senator's instructions are clear: just the sister. Mara's faith is clearer: she goes nowhere without these kids.

Seven days across hostile territory under three competing protocols (Asher's, the senator's, and the one Mara still calls God's) will rewrite what every adult in the convoy thought they knew about love, duty, and the price of bringing someone home. Five children. One condemned vehicle. One mafia of small kindnesses hidden in every village along the way.

A faith-forward, sweet-and-clean, slow-burn military romance with a kettle on the back burner, a small dog named Gus, a four-year-old who calls every armed operator "big man," and a love story that takes two thousand kilometers and one salt flat under the stars to come up the way she has decided to let it.

Book One of The Sentinel Series. Four operators. One private military contractor they walk away from. A chain of small people who hide other small people in three countries and three languages. A series for readers of Lynn H. Blackburn, Susan May Warren, and Lynette Eason.