Synopsis

Her world didn’t shatter. She did.

The explosion that should have ended Moura’s life rewired her instead — $4.2 million in surgical reconstruction, but her identity paid the real cost. Her instincts turned lethal.
She understands the Fermat Point better than anyone alive, a deadly military secret designed to eradicate unexpected enemies. But now she knows how to think like it.

Her carefully controlled world fractures when her protégé, George, a spy convicted of treason, is released from solitary confinement, and an impostor clone of Moura interferes with company operations. The clone haunts her, accusing her of abandoning the idealism that drove her as a young woman, before Patrick and Stefan engineered her transformation.
Her husband, Patrick, is cruel and prescient. Her lover Stefan, a shady warlord who burns worlds to preserve her, has her loyalty. They believe she is compliant. They don’t realize that she now must learn to calculate them.

Moura’s former attorney, Craig Malcault, uncovered the fatal. Distinguishing an ally from a threat requires knowing how allies become suspects, and suspects become threats. That was what no one was meant to find. Moura has seventy-two hours to outmaneuver the machinery built to destroy her.

The only person who can save her is the one she’s terrified to become.

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Excerpt

Moura stood perfectly still in the storm. The black uniform of Ara Pacis was a sentinel that could brace any flood or fate. She could find her way to the sanctum at night, with her eyes closed.

Stefan and Moura had spent decades constructing this short border line. Everyone else saw it as a square, grey corridor no more than six feet in length, in the human world.

And there he stood, where he should have been. He faced her silhouetted against the colorless, floor-to-ceiling Northwestern ballistic glass front. Moura noticed he released a subtle tension in his ribcage—she had surprised him just as he was about to undertake a swift sideways step, but then the bridge of his foot had arched slightly, a fast dancer’s pose, about to fly.

Moura arched her back. Her body stung with passion underneath the tight costume. She instinctively puckered her lips. She was a goddess returning to her element.

The gale that made the sun sparkle low over the ocean behind him portended the arrival of a cyclone, an icy furnace of rain. She noted how Stefan commanded the area the way gravity pulls light into its orbit—subtle yet impossible to get away from once you stepped into it.

“You didn’t come in over the terrace,” he said. She thought he hinted at her recent third-floor scene at Resource Global headquarters. “I expected you from there.”

Stefan always welcomed her in this elegant, measured tone, promising cauldrons of desire. Moura could not help but note how the man was a dream come true. He captivated her, his demeanor a study in contradictions. Stefan inhabited his own skin with the quiet confidence of a man who has lived in fire and darkness, emerging not unscathed, but unbroken.

His eyes drank her in—the way the rain pearled on her skin, how her hair had been made rebellious from the lashes of the storm, her measured, stoic breaths that slowly warmed her dripping-wet uniform. Her presence transformed even this sterile sanctum into something brimming with life.

“I felt it in the storm,” she murmured. Her fingers found the pulse point at his sternum, where civilized reserve in this ethereal but dangerous place warred with something far more primal. “The earth herself is restless. The old patterns are breaking.”

Stefan’s hands framed her face as if she were constructed from moonlight and might dissolve at dawn, while there was no escaping from his fastidious gaze.

Moura felt her stomach flutter and her nipples press against her uniform. She broke free and hurried into her dressing room, not far from the luminous living area, but paneled in black onyx. She swiftly caught her breath. Her reflection multiplied in the mirroring surfaces.

Moura discarded her uniform. She stood upright and firm, a woman ruthless in her beliefs, hidden deeply beneath a layer of diamonds and silk. The crystalline dressing room light rendered every inch of her La Perla lace-clad form in harsh chiaroscuro.

Her fingertips drifted over the curve of her ribs, tracing the scars of what had been reckless but necessary to survive. She lingered on the deep incision where her right leg had almost been severed from her hip.

Familiar footsteps approached across the polished marble floor. Stefan’s presence filled the space behind her, steady as the tide yet charged with the decades he had spent dancing with shadows in the minefields.

“How long do I have?” she asked, though her tone suggested she was asking about more than operational security.

“Three days. Maybe less.”

“I’ll face it.” Moura’s fingers trembled, but she steadied them with an arctic breath.

Stefan’s hand found her waist, a touch both possessive and protective there where her leg would have come loose from the rest of her body, had she not been so fortunate. His fingers lingered, tracing along the scar, over her buttocks to where, healing, the scar grazed into her flesh down her pelvic ridge. The heat of it seeped through the delicate lace until it felt like skin upon skin.

Her eyes welled with tears of yearning that refracted their light like liquid prisms, accusing, tender, and knowing.

“Moura,” Stefan whispered against her temple, and this time her name carried gratitude and wonder and promises for what tomorrow might bring.

About the Author

Maria Ian, Ph.D., J.D., is a medical science writer and a human rights political and psychological thriller novelist.

With three medical doctors in her immediate family and three in her extended one, Ian felt inspired to investigate the extraordinary, miraculous connection between spirit and energy behind the science. Instead of a scalpel, she chose to pick up the pen.

Ian is best known for her exotic psychological thriller series featuring Craig Malcault, a human rights attorney. Craig’s surgical dissection of canonical corruption and the unexpected human quest for justice is guaranteed to keep you, the reader, on the edge of your page-turning seat.

Maria identifies her heritage as Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Central South Asian, and Chinese, which comes in handy when writing new global characters with flair. When not writing, Maria can be found resetting her mind in nature, where she studies the sublime in herbalism and acupressure fitness. She wants to know how it is that, while humans were created to endure fear and stress, they daily choose to excel as visionaries.

Dr. Maria Ian holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D. She is a certified personal trainer, Yoga instructor, and a certified nutritionist. She holds seven professional certifications in health & fitness, six in traditional Chinese medicine, and several in trauma counseling. Dr. Ian was a project manager for legal service providers for more than fifteen years.

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