CODE TO THE HEARTby Elias ThornwickSome systems are built to keep everyone out. Some people are too.At 2:47 a.m., six monitors go dark on the forty-first floor of Vance Dynamics, one half-second apart, hours before the signing of a forty-billion-dollar acquisition.Elena Vance has built an empire on three hours of sleep and zero tolerance for excuses. She has fired executives mid-sentence, outlasted boardroom rivals, and trusted no one with the keys to her private server. Now that server is dead, her IT team is useless, and the one engineer who might save her has refused to work for her twice.Julian Reed arrives at 3:34 a.m. in a wrinkled blazer over a hoodie, carrying a speaker playing lofi beats and a teapot of jasmine tea. He treats catastrophe like a crossword puzzle and a furious billionaire like a mildly interesting weather system. When Elena orders him to turn the music off, he says no. When she threatens to end his career, he smiles and tells her to sit down, because she's making the server nervous.She sits. She doesn't understand why.Then Julian finds the proof that this was no accident. The crash was triggered by Elena's own credentials, logged one minute before anyone noticed, while she stood in plain view of a dozen witnesses. Someone inside her company wants her ruined, and they've been patient, careful, and close.To find them, Elena must do the one thing she has never done: let someone behind her walls. Julian, who insists that rest isn't weakness and that a leader who never sleeps is just a very expensive system waiting to fail, begins quietly rewriting the rules she lives by. No emails after midnight. Lunch away from the desk. Listening in meetings before speaking. Takeout at 2 a.m. over a stack of error logs, where the soft admissions start to slip out.Slowly, the woman the world calls icy begins to thaw. Her employees notice. Her board notices. And Elena notices that the only thing more terrifying than losing control is how much she wants Julian to stay.But Julian carries his own unresolved code. He walked away from a company he built once, and he's learned to deflect every hard feeling with a joke. As the traitor's trail narrows toward someone Elena loves, and a leak exposes her private life to the world, trust shatters. Julian takes the fall to protect her. Elena, for the first time, doesn't know how to fight for someone.Now she must choose between the armor that made her powerful and the vulnerability that might finally make her whole, while Julian must decide whether he's brave enough to stop running from the one thing he can't fix with a clever line.With a rooftop wedding under a storm that holds off for exactly one hour, and the loud, joyful chaos of raising two spirited children, Sophie and Brayan, Code to the Heart follows two opposites from the first clash to a lifetime of everything that comes after.It's a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romance with a boss and a brilliant, unbothered IT engineer, dueling intensity and charm, a mystery that keeps tightening, and a love story about learning that you can be strong and still let someone in.Perfect for readers who love: • Workplace romance with sharp banter • Opposites attract and slow-burn tension • Ice-queen heroines and sunshine heroes • Mysteries with a heartbreak at the center • Happily-ever-afters that earn every pageBecause the most dangerous breach is the one that gets past every defense you've built, and leaves you glad it did.

Daughter of the FalconThe Hatshepsut SagaThebes, 1500 BCE. Egypt is the greatest power on earth, and its king has just come home with a dead enemy hanging from his ship's prow. His young daughter Hatshepsut watches without flinching and asks the one question no one else dares: didn't he have a mother?Quick-witted, stubborn, and born a girl in a world that crowns only sons, Hatshepsut grows up among temple builders, scheming queens, and rival princes. She learns early that every throne has a price, that stone outlasts kings, and that the people who shape a kingdom are rarely the ones wearing the crown.Over more than two hundred chapters, this saga follows her from a curious child climbing the palace sycamore to the woman who would take the double crown, command an empire, and build monuments meant to last forever. It is a story of ambition and loyalty, of love and betrayal, and of a daughter determined to be remembered.Tagline options: • She was born a princess. She chose to become a king. • Egypt's greatest builder began as a girl who asked the wrong questions.

The chapter opens in the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes during the season of Akhet—the annual inundation when the Nile River floods the black soil, transforming the landscape into a vast mirror reflecting the sky. Eleven-year-old Prince Amenhotep stands at the margins of court society during the final rites of his elder brother, Crown Prince Thutmose.Thutmose was the idealized golden child of Egypt: athletic, intelligent, charismatic, and already appointed High Priest of Ptah at Memphis. He was widely regarded by the court, the priesthood, and the common people as the consummate future pharaoh. However, after returning from Memphis with a chest fever during the summer heat, Thutmose succumbed to illness within nine days.For seventy days—the standard period required for mummification in the House of Purification on the West Bank—the Royal Court at the palace of Malkata maintained a thin veneer of normal operation. Cooks baked, scribes tracked grain yields, and harpists played in the garden courts overlooking the massive artificial lake constructed by Pharaoh Amenhotep III for Queen Tiye. Beneath this facade, grief was strictly compartmentalized: only the women wept, and even then, strictly behind woven screens.