Eve Lancaster had never felt safe. Not really. Not in childhood, not in adulthood, and certainly not now.

Her world had always been shaped by silence—the kind that crept into locked rooms, that lurked beneath hushed conversations, that festered beneath secrets no one dared to name. She had grown up in a house filled with long hallways and closed doors, where the echoes of something unspoken pressed against the walls like ghosts.

Her parents had never been ordinary.

Her mother, Seraphina Lancaster, was a woman whose elegance masked an unforgiving heart—a socialite who moved through high-society gatherings like a queen surveying her court. Cold, calculated, and endlessly obsessed with image.

Her father, Christopher Lancaster, had been different. Warmer, quieter. But his silence was dangerous in its own way. He had always been looking over his shoulder, always checking the locks twice, always ensuring Eve understood one fundamental truth: Some people are born into secrets, and some people die because of them.

Eve had been taught to be invisible before she had learned how to speak.

Childhood Shadows..

She grew up in a mansion too large to feel like home, with parents who loved power more than they loved each other.

Her childhood was filled with carefully constructed rules—never ask too many questions, never go where you’re not supposed to, never trust what’s given freely.

And then, one night, everything fell apart.

She was eight years old when the masked men came. They broke into her home like whispers slipping beneath the cracks, moving without sound, without hesitation. By morning, half her father’s associates had vanished. Her mother told her it was business.

Eve knew better.

Her family was hiding something. Something that had nearly cost them their lives.

From that night on, she learned not to wait for protection.

She would never depend on anyone but herself.

Current Life: The Woman She Became..

Now, at twenty-six, Eve Lancaster lived in a world of precision.

She had forged a life far from the hollow halls of her childhood mansion, far from the lies and shadows her family had drowned themselves in.

Her job?

A forensic researcher specializing in crime scene reconstruction.

She studied blood patterns, documented the last moments before death claimed its victims, unravelled mysteries in a way she had never been allowed to in her own home. The irony wasn’t lost on her—she spent her days dissecting crimes while refusing to acknowledge the one that had shaped her past.

But even now, she was careful. She never stayed in one place too long. Never let people in too close.

Except for one person.

Family & Friends: The One Who Stayed..

Lena Moreau was the closest thing Eve had to family.

Her childhood best friend, a whirlwind of chaos and warmth, the complete opposite of everything Eve had grown up with. Where Eve was calculated, Lena was impulsive. Where Eve kept her emotions locked away, Lena wore hers like armour.

They had survived too much together to ever drift apart.

And Lena had been there for every moment of Eve’s escape from her past—the bad breakups, the anxiety-filled nights, the unspoken fears that sometimes crept up on her when she let her guard slip.

If there was anyone Eve trusted, it was her.

Which is why Lena was the only person Eve would have ever admitted one terrifying truth to:

Someone was watching her.

And that someone was him.

Damian Cross: The Man Who Shouldn’t Exist..

Damian Cross was not a man you stumbled upon by accident.

He didn’t meet people. He found them.

And Eve? She had been marked long before she ever saw his face.

He had studied her, followed her, learned the way she moved through the world, the way she ran but never hid. The way she existed on the edge of something she never acknowledged—danger, fate, inevitability.

He had been patient.

But now, patience was no longer enough.

Because Damian wasn’t just a man.

He was a force.

He was the whisper in the dark, the breath against the back of her neck when she thought she was alone, the presence she felt long before she had proof he was there.

And tonight, he would finally make himself known.

~TO BE CONTINUED....