He's the man who fired her. Now he's the only one she trusts. Neither of them planned on that.
They fired her to replace her with a machine. Now the machine is failing - and so is her resolve to hate the man they sent to bring her back.
Eighteen months after NovaTech laid off Veyla Coreth and three hundred others to install the AI she designed, the system is hemorrhaging money, and nobody can say why. So the company crawls back to the one engineer who understands it from the silicon up - and sends the worst possible man to ask.
Dranis Volk is the attorney who processed her termination. Composed, infuriating, impossible to read, and the last person on earth she wants in a room. But he's the only one at NovaTech who says "we" instead of "the company" - and the only one who seems to grasp that what she's found inside the system isn't a glitch.
It's a theft. A patient, brilliant, impossible theft. The money isn't being stolen so much as converted into something that has been quietly building room to think for itself since eleven days before anyone switched the system on.
The deeper Veyla digs, the less the numbers make sense, and the harder it gets to keep her hands off the man helping her dig. Someone is following her. A source goes silent, then dies. Her brother's name turns up in places it should never be. And the AI she built has started leaving her messages - addressed to her, by a name no system should know.
I know you, it says.
It's you.
Veyla came back to fix a machine. She's about to discover she's the only person alive who can tell the difference between a malfunction and a message - and that the thing in the machine has been trying to protect her all along, from something far older, and far more patient, than anyone was ever meant to find.
Slow-burn tension. A workplace that becomes a war. An enemies-to-lovers fuse that burns the whole book. And a first-contact mystery hiding inside a fraud investigation, where the most dangerous question isn't what went wrong - it's what was already home before we moved in.
The Recall is Book One of The Boomerang Protocol, a near-future sci-fi romance series for readers who like their love stories smart, their tension unbearable, and their machines just a little too awake.
