Debugging the Heart

A standalone contemporary romance from the interconnected Horizon Initiative Universe. Pretending to be in love was supposed to keep them alive. Falling for each other was never part of the plan. Ava Mitchell trusts systems more than people. Brilliant, methodical, and emotionally reserved, she has built her entire career around logic, data, and cybersecurity analysis. In Ava's world, every problem has a solution if you look closely enough. Patterns make sense. Code makes sense. Human emotions usually don't. Then someone hacks directly into her life. When a sophisticated cyberattack compromises Ava's private research and exposes confidential information tied to a powerful tech corporation, she becomes the target of people willing to erase every trace of her existence to keep the truth buried. Suddenly, her apartment is no longer safe. Her devices are compromised. And someone is tracking her every move. That's when Dominic Reyes enters the picture. Quiet, hyper-vigilant, and dangerously controlled, Dominic is a tactical security specialist who lives by one rule: never get emotionally involved. He's spent years surviving in high-risk operations by trusting instinct over attachment and disappearing before anyone gets close enough to become a weakness. Protecting Ava should have been temporary. Simple. Professional. Until the only way to keep her hidden requires them to disappear together into a remote coastal town and pretend to be a deeply in love couple. What begins as a carefully staged performance quickly becomes something neither of them can fully control. Shared spaces. Fake dates. One bed when the power goes out. The constant awareness of each other in places far too small to escape the growing tension between them. And somewhere between the lies they tell everyone else, the truth between them starts becoming impossible to ignore. Because Ava slowly discovers the loneliness Dominic hides beneath his rigid control.