HATE and LOVE

Elara Voss is a forensic archivist living in Mirenhall — a fog-shrouded city that doesn't appear on any map. When a mysterious file of photographs lands on her desk, she discovers her mother, Seraphine, missing for eleven years, is alive and hiding somewhere in the city. The same file lands on the desk of Caden Ashford, a private investigator who has been searching for Seraphine for six years.Thrown together by a force neither of them understands, Elara and Caden descend into the city's underground — the Underloft — where they uncover a secret archive, centuries-old carvings, and a conspiracy centred on something called the Adjacent: a parallel layer of reality whose boundary with the observable world is dangerously close to collapse.At the heart of the threat is Director Orin Vale, head of the Veyrath Institute, where Elara has worked for nine years — a man who has spent six decades engineering the very catastrophe they are trying to prevent, sincerely believing he is saving the world.As Elara and Caden race to find Seraphine, stabilise a failing metaphysical membrane, and confront Vale before it is too late, they must also navigate the most inconvenient thing of all: falling for each other. Two careful, closed-off people who began as adversaries find, in the middle of an impossible crisis, that they have become each other's fixed point.HATE AND LOVE is a story about the thin line between opposition and devotion, the cost of necessary silences, and the kind of love that is built rather than found — one hard-won day at a time.