Prologue

The knock on the door came just after sunrise—three sharp raps that split the quiet morning in half.

Ava Hartley had been pouring cereal, still in her sleep shirt, when she saw two uniformed soldiers through the glass pane. For a moment, she didn’t understand. Her father was supposed to video-call that night. He had promised. “Just one more week, sweetheart,” he had said from the base in Iraq, smiling through grainy pixels. “Then I’m home.”

But the look on the soldiers’ faces stole the breath from the room.

Her mother’s cry came first—raw and broken—before she collapsed to her knees. Ava couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. She stared at the folded flag being placed gently into her mother’s shaking hands. The edges of the world blurred, and Ava felt herself slipping backwards, as though gravity itself had changed direction.

Her father—her hero—was gone.

For days after, Ava walked through the house like a ghost in her own skin. At night she tucked herself into his old jacket, inhaling the fading scent of desert sand and worn leather. She had never felt a silence so loud.

Three years passed, but grief didn’t work like everyone said it would. It didn’t fade; it simply settled in deeper, becoming a part of her bones.

Life shifted in quiet ways. Ava learned to smile again—small, careful smiles that never quite reached her eyes. She made it through school, helped her mother, tried not to crumble whenever she saw soldiers on television.

And then her mother remarried.

A good man, everyone said. Steady. Patient. Someone who could help rebuild the life that had cracked the day her father died. Ava tried to be supportive, tried to ignore the guilt that tightened her chest when she saw her mother genuinely laugh for the first time in years.

But life wasn’t done surprising her.

Her new stepfather had a son.

Jace.

The first time Ava met him, he stood leaning against the moving truck, arms crossed, every line of him sharp with indifference. He had a reputation that reached their quiet suburb long before he did—troublemaker at his last school, a boy who didn’t follow rules unless he wrote them himself. His green eyes flicked toward her, unreadable and cool.

Ava lifted her chin, unwilling to be intimidated.

He smirked, as if accepting a challenge she hadn’t meant to issue.

And just like that, they were opposites thrown into the same storm.

Now they were seventeen… and sharing a home neither of them had asked for.

Ava did her best to avoid him—slipping out early, studying late, pretending his presence didn’t unsettle her. But the walls of the house were thin, and so was her resolve. She caught glimpses she wasn’t prepared for: Jace coming back from a run, sweat dampening the collar of his T-shirt; Jace shrugging off his jacket, the muscles in his arms shifting with the movement; Jace watching her with an expression she couldn’t name.

Sometimes he’d pause when she passed him in the hallway, his voice low but calm.

“Ava… maybe be a little more careful,” he’d say, nodding to the too-loose sweater sliding off her shoulder. “This house has more windows than you realize.”

Her cheeks would burn—not because of fear, but because she couldn’t tell whether he was teasing her… or protecting her.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” he warned once, but the words sounded less like a threat and more like a line he was terrified they both might cross.

Their lives had collided by fate—two strangers forced into a family neither quite understood. But tension hung between them like an unfinished sentence, fragile and impossible to ignore.

Ava wasn’t looking for trouble.

She certainly wasn’t looking for him.

But sometimes trouble looked right back.

And sometimes… it had Jace’s eyes.