"What's your name?"
"Guess."
He glanced at the lighter in my hand. Smirked, just a little. "Alright, then. Vivienne."
That made me pause. It wasn't my name. Not even close. But the way he said it, soft and deliberate, it landed like something heavier than just a guess.
"Vivienne, huh," I repeated, almost to myself. "She'd probably laugh at that."
A silver lighter passed down from a dead brother to a dead ex-girlfriend, and now it burns in Alice Shade's pocket like a secret she can't let go of.
Drowning under the weight of family trauma and impossible expectations, Alice isn't looking to be saved, but Deon Blackwell keeps showing up anyway. He's trouble, he's quiet, and he sees her in a way no one ever has.
As the nights get colder and the past comes back in smoke and silence, they strike a fragile match between pain and healing. But love, like fire, always leaves something behind.
A story about guilt, survival, and the kind of connection that feels like it might burn you alive, this is a slow, aching unraveling of two broken people trying to hold onto each other before it's too late.
Something ancient is waking.
And it's calling their names.
Lance Mercer has always felt wrong ....the strange mark on his chest, the voices that whisper in his dreams, the shadows that follow when no one's there. He hides it all behind silence and discipline. Because control is the only thing keeping him sane.
Then Adrianne Veyra crashes into his world ,radiant, reckless, and far too curious for his own good. A boy whose light shouldn't exist near Lance's darkness.
But something recognizes them.
A bond older than blood, written long before they were born.
And when their rivalry ignites, so does the power buried inside them - divine light and demon blood, bound by a curse older than time.
The marks on their skin are changing. The air hums when they're near each other. And the closer they get, the thinner the veil between this world and the one that remembers them.
Because this isn't just a story about enemies.
It's about what happens when fate rediscovers its war -
and love becomes the battlefield.