[note: this is the sequel to Smolder.] Lacey Strauss has spent the last four months in forests and alleyways, assisting in murder and finding the path to closure over her long-lost friend Bridget - and simply trying to survive with a seventeen-year-old assassin named Asher and his older drunkard of a brother, Alex. But Lacey has realized that she's less of a captive and more of an...acquaintance, maybe? There's never any certainty in the relationship between Asher and Lacey, bitter enemies one moment and infatuation the next. There's never a definite line on where professionalism stops in Asher's occupation, where Lacey's stability begins and ends. Every choice, every decision, every line she draws could be the difference between life or death. And not just her own anymore.

Killing the gray-eyed, dark haired boy across the street in her minuscule town was closure to Lacey Strauss that evening, even when she'd never killed anything in her life, even when her past was just a broken record of leaving, leaving, and left, even when the whole world seemed dead set on working against her. And it would've been achieved if her victim hadn't been Asher Malloy: an avid smoker and commissioned killer at seventeen, working for the regional drug lord alongside his amiable alcoholic of an older brother, Alex. Because when Asher turns the situation around and takes Lacey captive for five months, closure's a long time coming -- if she doesn't die first. SMOLDER tells of an intense and unlikely relationship between Lacey Strauss, an unstable teenager with violence in her blood, and Asher Malloy, a smoking, knife-throwing, incredibly cold and temperamental killer. But as tensions swell and fade between the two, anywhere from lethal hatred to headstrong intimacy, suddenly Asher finds himself valuing the very girl who tried to kill him while Lacey starts realizing the value of human life the more she must take it.