In this proceedings, we review our recent work on the heavy quark radiative energy loss in nuclei due to multiple parton scattering within the recently improved high-twist approach, where gauge invariance can be ensured by a delicate setup of the initial partons' transverse momenta. Our new result is consistent with the previous calculations of light quark energy loss in the massless limit and heavy quark energy loss in the soft gluon radiation limit, respectively. We show numerically the correction to the heavy quark energy loss as compared with previous result and with soft gluon radiation approximation. The necessity to go beyond soft gluon radiation limit is demonstrated for a global description of light and heavy flavor data in heavy-ion collisions.