Ashes of Our Youth

She left him to burn. He became the fire.Ten years ago, Fallon Reed fled her toxic childhood home in the dead of night, leaving behind the one person who understood her damage — her stepbrother, Jace Vance. She told herself it was survival. She told herself she had no choice. She told herself he'd be fine.She was wrong.Now Fallon is back. A polished city woman with a pressed blazer and a twenty-six-hour timeline, she expects to sign a few papers, settle the estate, and disappear. What she finds instead is Jace — massive, dangerous, and waiting in the foyer of a house he rebuilt with his bare hands. A house he owns. A house he has no intention of letting her leave.The tires are slashed. The phone is dead. The road to town is nine miles of nothing.And Jace has rules.He doesn't want an apology. He doesn't want closure. He wants her to remember every room, every hallway, every scar she left behind when she chose herself over him. He wants her guilt, her surrender, and her absolute attention. He wants to break the woman she became and drag the girl she buried back to the surface.What he doesn't expect is for the punishment to become something else. Something darker. Something neither of them can stop.Because Fallon isn't just staying for the documents. She's staying because the cage he built feels more like home than the freedom she spent a decade pretending to enjoy. And Jace isn't just collecting a debt. He's falling into the same fire he set — and this time, they're both going to burn.