Deadline Heat

When investigative journalist Talia Okoye receives a burner phone packed with cryptic voice notes, she stumbles onto a hidden pipeline moving victims through luxury condos, yacht parties, and PortMiami’s steel labyrinth. Her editor pairs her with the last person she wants at her side: Rafael “Rafe” Cruz, the award-winning photojournalist she once loved and can’t forgive. Their chemistry is a live wire; their history is a minefield. But the story won’t wait.

From Little Havana back rooms to Wynwood’s glittering night scene, Talia and Rafe go undercover, racing a clock set by men who buy silence with money—and enforce it with blood. Each revelation tightens the noose: a shell nonprofit laundering souls, a councilman greasing the gears, a cop who “loses” cases that cut too close. When a dockworker begs them to save his sister before sunrise, the mission becomes personal—and lethal.

A tail through Biscayne traffic. A trap at a motel off the causeway. A refrigerated container cooling toward catastrophe. In the suffocating heat, trust becomes a weapon. Rafe’s lens captures what power denies; Talia’s words turn evidence into reckoning. Then the ring strikes back—abducting Rafe, and demanding Talia kill the story to spare his life.

She makes a different choice.

In a final showdown beneath sodium lights and stacked containers, truth goes live to the world as sirens converge. Deadline Heat is a breathless, heart-piercing thriller about justice, redemption, and the courage it takes to love again when the stakes are life or death.