by Bullie Jean
Some truths are written. Others are bled. Lilith is a senior investigative journalist whose life is a study in safe choices. By day, she navigates the sterile wreckage of a dying marriage to Mark, a corporate high-flyer who treats her less as a partner than as the efficient keeper of his life. By night, she lives with the screaming in her chest; a gnawing need for a reality with teeth. That need leads her to a scrubbed crime scene at a dockside cannery, where the evidence has been erased too cleanly to be accidental. There, she meets Saul, a high-level “consultant” to the city’s elite. He is the man who manages the silence, ensuring that the city’s blood never reaches print. As Lilith uncovers a conspiracy of diverted cargo and municipal corruption, she realizes Saul is not merely an adversary. He is the only person who truly sees her. What begins as a professional duel becomes a dangerous intimacy, a chess match played in the city’s gray spaces, where hunter and prey blur, truth becomes negotiable, and Lilith must decide what kind of woman survives when the screaming finally stops.
