Novels by Riyah~

Aria's PoV:Surgery is the one place in the world where nothing exists except what is in front of you.Not history. Not memory. Not the particular cruelty of coincidence or the way the universe apparently has a sense of humour dark enough to put Marcus Veil on my table on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday morning. In theatre, the only thing that exists is the body, the problem, and the solution. Everything else is noise, and I do not tolerate noise in my operating room.I have saved people I didn't like before.I have saved people who did not deserve saving, by any metric a reasonable person might apply. A man who beat his wife. A drunk driver who had left someone else in a different hospital. A corrupt official whose face I had seen on the news doing things that made me quietly furious.I saved all of them.Not because I am saintly. Because I am a surgeon. Because the moment I walk through those theatre doors the question of who a person is becomes entirely irrelevant — the only

Aria’s PoV:Seven years changes everything.Seven years ago I was a girl on a train with three months of savings and a borrowed flat and a promise I wasn't sure I could keep.I had no medical degree. No credentials. No name worth anything in any room that mattered. I had a child growing inside me and a fury I had not yet learned to refine into something useful.Fury, I discovered, is extraordinary fuel.My name — my real name, the one that means something now — is Dr. Aria Vale.I chose Vale deliberately. Not random, not arbitrary. Vale: a valley, a low place between high things.A reminder of where I had been. Of what it felt like to be at the bottom looking up and choosing, on a worn sofa in a borrowed flat, to climb anyway.I walk into Meridian General at six forty-three every morning. Not six forty-five. Not six-fifty. Six forty-three, because the surgical floor handover begins at seven and I like fourteen minutes to move through my domain before the noise of the day begins. The

Aria’s PoV:I gave myself three weeks.Not because I was afraid — though I was, in the marrow-deep way that doesn't announce itself as fear but simply lives in you, reshaping things quietly. I gave myself three weeks because I am not impulsive. Whatever Marcus believed about me, compliant, uncomplicated, useful — he had never understood that the stillness in me wasn't passivity. It was patience. It was the particular discipline of a woman who had learned early that the world does not reward visible wanting.Three weeks to plan. Three weeks to become invisible before I disappeared.I started with money.Not his — I wasn't naive enough to touch anything traceable. But I had a small account from before the marriage, modest savings from three years of administrative work at an architecture firm, and Marcus had been depositing a monthly allowance into a separate account since the wedding. Household expenses, he called it. I had been careful with it. Careful the way a woman is careful w

Aria’ PoV The stick had two lines.I sat on the cold tile of the en suite bathroom floor, back against the cabinet, knees pulled to my chest, and stared at it for a very long time. Outside the frosted window, the city was doing what it always did — moving, breathing, indifferent. Inside, everything had stopped.Two lines.I pressed my hand flat against my stomach. Nothing felt different. Nothing felt like anything, really, except the particular silence that descends when your life pivots on a single moment and the world hasn't caught up yet.“Pregnant.”I said it quietly, to no one, to the empty room. Testing the shape of it in my mouth.I had been married to Marcus Veil for eleven weeks. I didn't tell him straight away.I know how that sounds. But you have to understand what those eleven weeks had been — the careful geography of our life together, the unspoken rules I was still mapping. Marcus left before seven each morning. He returned when he returned, sometimes eight, sometimes

Aria’s PoV:They told me I looked beautiful.I stood at the edge of the grand reception hall, white silk pooling around my feet like something expensive and borrowed, because it was — and smiled at every face that turned my way. Aunties I hadn't seen in years pressed perfumed cheeks to mine and whispered congratulations into my hair.His associates nodded from across the room with that particular brand of approval reserved for acquisition, not admiration.I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself a lot of things that night.Marcus Veil stood near the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end of the room, a glass of amber liquid in one hand, his attention fixed somewhere beyond the glass — beyond all of us, really. He wore a black suit that had probably cost more than my mother's house, and he wore it the way he wore everything: like it owed him something. Like the world owed him something.He was devastating. I won't pretend otherwise, even now. Even after everything.I had told m