Book excerpt: The stunning finale to RITA Award-winner Anne Stuart’s The Ice Series brings us back to Japan, where deadly machinations have an odd couple in their crosshairs. In the wake of a failed love affair, Jilly Lovitz takes off for Tokyo. She’s expecting to cry on her sister’s shoulder, then spend a couple months blowing off steam in Japan. Instead, she’s snatched away on the back of a motorcycle, narrowly avoiding a grisly execution attempt meant for her sister and brother-in-law. Her rescuer Reno is the Committee’s most unpredictable agent. They’d met once before and the attraction was strange—opposites in more way than one—but electric. Now Reno and Jilly are pawns in a deadly tangle of assassination attempts, kidnappings, and prisoner swaps that could put their steamy partnership on ice. Previously published.