My First Love — Novel Blurb --- **Some stories don't announce themselves. They begin quietly, in ordinary places — a crowded registration hall, a window, a girl standing still in the middle of noise — and by the time you understand what's happening, you're already inside them.** --- Daniel Reeves arrives at Harlow University in Boston with a simple understanding of himself: he is careful, observant, and entirely unacquainted with love. Not the real kind. Not the kind that stays when the person is no longer in your line of sight. At twenty-one, he has made a quiet peace with this — his life is organized, his intentions are clear, and Boston is far enough from Chicago to feel like a fresh start. Then, on the second day of registration week, he sees a girl standing by a window. She is not doing anything remarkable. She is simply standing with a folder against her chest, looking outside with the particular stillness of someone whose mind has gone somewhere quieter than a crowded room. He does not know her name. He does not know anything about her. But he finds, quite suddenly, that he cannot look away. Her name is Prisca Hayden. She is from Portland, Oregon. She is studying communications and media, she wants to make documentary films that change how people see situations they thought they already understood, and she thinks in complete arguments rather than fragments — a quality someone identified in her at thirteen that she has been quietly protecting ever since. She is direct without being cold, composed without being distant, and she has a way of listening that makes the person speaking feel like the only thing in the room worth paying attention to. She is, in short, unlike anyone Daniel has ever met. *My First Love* is the story of what happens next — told slowly, honestly, and in full. It is a story about two people who find each other in the ordinary architecture of a semester — the same class twice a week, a coffee shop on Harlow Avenue, a secondhand bookstore on Commonwealth, a documentary screening at a small Cambridge theatre on a cold November Saturday. It is about the particular courage required to be clear about what you want when clarity feels like exposure. About the difference between being careful and being hidden, and the moment you realize you have been doing one when you meant to do the other. Alongside Daniel and Prisca, *My First Love* is populated with the people who make a life feel inhabited. Peter Calloway — Daniel's best friend, endlessly perceptive beneath his easy humor, falling for his own unexpected someone while trying to dispense advice he is still learning himself. Abdullahi Hassan — methodical, warm in the specific way of someone who expresses care through precision, whose quiet counsel lands with the accuracy of someone who has thought about everything twice before speaking. And Dora Mitchell — Prisca's best friend, the most forthcoming person in any room she enters, whose apparent interference is always, underneath, a form of love. These are not dramatic people in dramatic circumstances. Their lives are not organized around crisis or catastrophe. They are simply young, and in Boston, and trying to build something true in the middle of everything else that a semester requires of them. And somehow that ordinariness becomes the most interesting thing — because the novel understands that real love does not arrive with fanfare. It arrives in the way someone says your name at the end of a text message. In a diagram shared without being asked. In a mark made on a map because a moment mattered and you wanted to remember that it did. *My First Love* is told with restraint and precision, in prose that matches its characters — clear-eyed, unhurried, trusting the weight of small things to carry what they carry. It does not rush toward its revelations. It earns them, the way the best relationships earn their certainty — through accumulation, through consistency, through showing up in the ordinary moments until the ordinary moments become the whole story. For anyone who has ever stood at a fork in a path and watched someone walk away smiling and known, in the specific quiet of that moment, that something had begun that would not easily end — this novel is for you. For anyone who has ever written two words at the top of a blank page not entirely knowing why, and found that those two words were enough to carry them forward into everything that followed — this novel is for you. For anyone who has ever been found, unexpectedly, in a year that had a different plan entirely — this novel is most certainly for you. --- *Twenty marks on a map. Every one of them true.* *This is how it begins.*

OWNED BY THE STORM By Victor Solace She wasn't supposed to matter. That was the first thing Ethan Storm told himself the morning Mia Calloway walked into his building, took one look at him, and laughed. Nobody laughed at Ethan Storm. Nobody dared. But she did, and something in him that had been cold and locked and buried for eleven years cracked open like a fault line. He didn't show it. He never showed anything. He simply watched her walk toward the elevator, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, completely unaware that she had just made the most dangerous mistake of her life. He let her leave. Then he pulled her file, read every page twice, and made a decision he would spend the next year trying to justify. He is everything she was warned about. Ethan Storm built his empire on two things: ruthless precision and deliberate silence. Eleven billion dollars. Three continents. One name that makes boardrooms go quiet and rivals go pale. He doesn't explain himself. He doesn't apologize. He doesn't feel, or so the world believes. The truth is buried somewhere beneath the scar on his left hand, the locked floor of his penthouse, and the name he hasn't spoken out loud in over a decade. He doesn't do relationships. He doesn't do soft. He does control, strategy, and distance, and he does them perfectly. Until her. She is everything he didn't plan for. Mia Calloway came to New York with seventy dollars, a graphic design portfolio, and the quiet, stubborn belief that she could build something real from nothing. She's not wealthy. She's not connected. She doesn't know the rules of the world Ethan moves in, and that, more than anything, is what makes her dangerous to him. She sees through things. Through people. Through the careful, immaculate armor he has spent his entire adult life constructing. She sees him, and she's terrified by what she finds. She should walk away. Every instinct she has tells her to walk away. But Ethan Storm doesn't let go of things he decides to keep. What begins as a job becomes something neither of them has a name for. Obsession dressed up as professionalism. Desire disguised as strategy. Two people circling something devastating and calling it control. He gives her a position no one else was offered. She tells herself it's an opportunity. He tells himself it's nothing, just curiosity, just a temporary fascination that will burn out like every other one before it. They are both lying. And someone in Ethan's world knows exactly how this story ends, because they've been waiting years for a weakness like Mia Calloway to appear. But storms don't just bring lightning. They bring the wreckage of everything you didn't protect. There are things Ethan hasn't told her. Things buried in his company's founding, in his family's money, in the silence surrounding a woman whose photograph sits in a locked drawer on the fifty-third floor. There are people around Mia who are not who they claim to be, people who smiled at her, helped her, held her trust, and handed it quietly to someone who knows exactly how to use it. Betrayal, when it comes, will not arrive as a stranger. It will come wearing a familiar face. This is not a love story about a man who is saved by the right woman. Ethan Storm does not need saving. He needs stopping, and Mia may be the only one reckless enough, brave enough, foolish enough to try. This is a story about obsession that crosses the line between protection and possession. About a powerful man who has never wanted anything he couldn't control, and a woman who cannot be controlled. About secrets that don't stay buried. About the unbearable, devastating, world-ending feeling of loving someone who was built to destroy everything they touch. Including you. Especially you. Because here is the thing no one tells you about Ethan Storm: He always wins. He has always won. But Mia Calloway is the first person in eleven years who has made him want something more than victory. And that is precisely what makes her a target. Some men are dangerous because they're cruel. Ethan Storm is dangerous because he's not, not with her, and he hates himself for it. OWNED BY THE STORM. The truth about what he is will break her heart. The truth about what she means to him may break everything else. By Victor Solace Available now.