Mike Dorset has spent months trying to become the kind of man his daughter can count on.
He has a steady job again. Life with Soojin is more stable. Ellie is finally old enough to believe her father might just keep coming home. Then Mike enters a one-hundred-mile race around Lake Tahoe and finds out the mountain is carrying something far worse than pain.
Khushi Sharma is supposed to be just another runner in the field. Instead she is the target of a professional operation built around a stolen laptop, compromised security, and a piece of AI-driven financial infrastructure powerful enough to create chaos if the wrong people get control of it. Two killers hidden among the runners wait until night to make their move.
Mike stops the grab, but only barely.
A runner dies.
The aid station explodes into panic.
And suddenly the race is over in every way that matters.
With Khushi alive but still needed by the people hunting her, Mike takes the only route left: off the course, into bad terrain, and away from every clean official answer. Through darkness, cold, exhaustion, and a widening dawn manhunt, he has to keep her moving while a support crew with vehicles, radios, and fresh bodies tries to close the mountain around them.
What starts as a race thriller becomes something colder and more dangerous: a survival chase about a man who was honestly trying to heal, the woman whose access could shake the global economy, and the terrible fact that Mike Dorset's best tool for getting them home may still be the part of himself he most wanted to leave behind.
