They Deserve the Fire

Mila Delacruz used to be unstoppable.The loud one. The daredevil. The girl who climbed rooftops for the view and tagged alley walls with colors that made the city breathe. While everyone else played it safe, Mila lived wide open.But that was before art school.Before professors bled the soul out of her work. Before she started making things to please people instead of to save herself. Before she walked away — dropped out without telling anyone — and came home for winter break pretending everything was fine.Now, with Lia engaged, Savannah thriving, and Imani chasing med school, Mila feels like the failure in the group. The one who lost her spark.Until Dante gives her a mission that changes everything.A splinter group from OM3N is resurfacing. They’re using a network of coded graffiti to communicate across the city — invisible to anyone who doesn’t know how to read it. But Mila does.Because this was her world before it was theirs.For the first time in a long time, Mila feels alive. Seen. Useful.There’s just one catch:She has to work with Kyle Donovan.Kyle is chaos wrapped in muscle and a grin. Dante’s infiltration guy. His saboteur. The man he sends when things need breaking — or blowing up. He’s reckless, infuriating, and exactly the kind of person Mila doesn’t have the patience for.And he’s thrilled to get under her skin.But when the mission starts, Mila sees something she didn’t expect: Kyle isn’t just chaos. He’s calculated. Skilled. Dangerous in all the ways that matter.And Kyle? He’s just as surprised by her.Because Mila — fiery, creative, unfiltered Mila — doesn’t back down. Not when he teases her. Not when she’s staring danger in the face. She pushes right back, challenging him, grounding his chaos with her own kind of fire.Working together means long nights in abandoned train yards, rooftop stakeouts, and safehouses with walls too thin to keep anything contained — not their banter, not their secrets, and definitely not their chemistry.Respect comes first. Then reluctant trust. Then the kind of heat that neither of them can fight.But the splinter cell isn’t just reviving OM3N’s old network. They’re ready to spill blood to take Dante’s syndicate down — and Mila and Kyle are in their way.Now it’s not just about decoding messages. It’s about surviving them.They Deserve the Fire is the third book in The Deserve Series — a dark, explosive romance about a daredevil artist who refuses to play small, a reckless infiltrator who learns his chaos can be sacred, and the dangerous mission that forces them to burn their past selves down to create something new.She was the spark. He was the fuse. Together, they’re the fire.