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Kiss Me Before the Kill Shot
Paperback
Publisher: Jake Markolt
Published: May 23 2026
Pages: 362
Weight: 0.92
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Kiss Me Before the Kill Shot is a high-stakes psychological thriller about what happens when an assassin trained to see the world through crosshairs is forced to see it through consequence instead.
Adrian Voss was never meant to choose. Built, refined, and deployed through a hidden global network known as The Circle, he is a professional sniper whose rare and dangerous flaw hesitation becomes the very tool that destabilizes the system that created him. When a contract leads him to investigative journalist Valeria Marquez, what begins as a clean assignment fractures into something far more volatile: memory, morality, and connection.
Valeria is not a victim, nor a simple target. She is a journalist digging into a hidden architecture of assassinations disguised as political accidents only to discover she is already inside the machinery she is trying to expose. When Adrian fails to complete the kill, their lives become irreversibly entangled, forcing them into a fragile alliance built on survival, mistrust, and the slow erosion of emotional armor.
They uncover The Circle: a covert system that does not merely eliminate targets but subtly steers global events, wars, markets, political collapses through engineered deaths and controlled instability. But the deeper they go, the more they realize the most dangerous part of the system is not its weapons, but its understanding of human psychology. Adrian himself was never an anomaly; he was designed to hesitate, to create predictable deviation that keeps the system adaptive.
As betrayals surface, handlers reveal themselves, and safe zones collapse into traps, Adrian and Valeria move through cities, safehouses, and surveillance-heavy environments where every alliance may be another layer of manipulation. Trust becomes transactional. Truth becomes selective. And love becomes the most unpredictable variable of all.
When The Circle begins to fracture under exposure, it doesn't die, it evolves. New layers emerge beyond its known structure, forcing Adrian to confront the possibility that even his rebellion has been anticipated. In the final convergence, he chooses not between obedience and defiance, but between returning to the system that made him or permanently existing outside it with Valeria.
Months later, after the collapse of known control structures and the global fallout of partial exposure, Adrian and Valeria live under assumed names in a quiet coastal town. The war is no longer visible, but its echo remains in every system trying to rebuild itself.
Adrian is no longer a man defined by targets. The rifle still exists, but it no longer defines direction. Valeria remains beside him not as a variable in someone else's equation, but as the one constant he refuses to reduce.
Kiss Me Before the Kill Shot is not just about assassination or conspiracy, it is about the moment a weapon learns hesitation, and what happens when that hesitation becomes a choice to live.
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