"You have four thousand two hundred and eleven days left. Give or take." Marlowe Quill has spent her whole career calculating how long strangers have to live. Nobody has ever calculated hers. Nobody was supposed to be able to. Then the elevator stalls between floors, heading to forty-eight, and Micah Shade tells her exactly how many days remain, without opening a single file, without knowing her name until she gives it. He hasn't aged in over a hundred years. He doesn't sicken, doesn't die, and he's survived every close call life has thrown at him by taking a single day, always from someone whose death was already coming anyway, never from anyone healthy, never once in a hundred years. Marlowe wasn't dying. He took from her anyway. Now she's holding a folder full of unexplained deaths that trace straight back to his company, a firm quietly burying its own audit overnight, and a compliance officer who vanished mid-sentence and reappeared hours later in a photograph she was never meant to see. Somewhere behind all of it is a woman from Micah's past, the only other person he ever tangled his existence to, and she's spent decades building an entire trust for one purpose: making sure it never happens again. It's happening again. Marlowe built her whole life on proof, on numbers that don't lie, on the certainty that nothing happens without a traceable cause. Micah has spent a century guarding the one rule that keeps his existence from unraveling into someone else's, the rule he broke the moment the elevator lights went out. She was never supposed to be the exception. He was never supposed to need one. Every day he doesn't take from her again is a day he's choosing her survival over his own certainty. Every day she doesn't walk away is a day she's choosing him over everything her career taught her to trust. Somewhere above them, floor forty-eight is still lit gold on the panel, waiting for the night neither of them will be able to take back. So why can't he stop thinking about her, and why can't she stop counting the days she has left with him instead of without him?

The invitation had no phone number. No return address. Just a name Briar Calloway hadn't seen written down since her grandmother died, folded into gold embossed paper that felt like a warning. She should have thrown it away. Instead she walked straight into the Ashgrave Rooms, an exclusive private venue built inside a deconsecrated cathedral, hired to assess an antique coffin for the reclusive man who owns it. The moment she touches the wood, it turns warm under her palm. The moment he walks in, something inside that coffin knocks back. Stefan Ashworth is not what he looks like. He is three hundred years old, bound to that coffin by a curse only one thing can hold off. A kiss. Freely given, it works every time. What nobody outside this family knows is what it costs the woman who gives it. He has already watched it destroy someone he loved once. He swore it would never happen again. Briar does not scare easily. She does not walk away easily either. And the more she learns about what her grandmother spent six silent years protecting her from, the less she wants to leave. Every kiss buys him time. Every kiss takes something from her that she will never get back. She has weeks to decide if he is worth the cost. He has weeks to decide if he can let her pay it.