December 2026
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December 2026 〰️
Cold Mercy: Dalton Frost - Book 2
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The Cast of Cold Mercy
The people who carry Book Two. Character studies by the author, drawn from the working manuscript.
Dalton Frost
The bearer. Ex-Army, and the man holding the stones after Book One put them in his hands. He rents a warehouse at the edge of town and tests them like equipment, because understanding them first feels safer than waiting to be understood.
Naomi Thorne
The first bearer. An ER nurse who carried the stones before Dalton and paid for every rescue they pulled her into. She gave them up and walked away from the work that defined her, and Book Two asks how long a person can stay walked away.
Marcus
The anchor. Dalton's oldest friend, the one hauling gear into the warehouse and keeping the coffee hot at four in the morning. He says out loud what everyone else is thinking, usually that he would like to stop discovering new properties of those rocks.
Simone
The instruments. She runs the monitoring rig: waveforms, baselines, intervals, the numbers nobody wants read out loud. She was the first to notice that the interval between pulses had started to change.
Kessler
The theory. The outside expert Dalton brought in, notebook always open, more comfortable with a hypothesis than a hunch. He is the one willing to say that the field looks like it is stabilizing rather than fading.
Harper
The fixer. She handles what the rest of the team cannot: access, transport, and the questions that follow a site nobody is supposed to know about. Her loyalty is real, and it comes with a price tag she has never pretended to hide.
Cortez
The badge. A detective whose case keeps intersecting with a warehouse she has no business caring about. She does not believe in coincidence, and she is patient enough to prove it.