TWO FACE OF THE DEVIL

Elian Shen was five years old when he watched, hidden inside a kitchen cabinet, as his mother was murdered by men working under his own uncle's orders — the price of his father's underground empire finally catching up to their quiet, ordinary life. Raised afterward behind walls of guards and cameras, trained from childhood to survive a world his father never wanted for him, Elian grew up gentle, sleepy, and nearly silent — until an eight-year-old encounter with a chatty, red-haired little girl named Angelina Wang Anderson cracked something open in him that a decade of careful discipline never touched. Angelina — Nana to the people who love her, Starlight to Elian, Iaan to her — is the sunshine daughter of a retired mafia don turned tech CEO, sheltered from a past she doesn't fully understand: a mother killed in infancy, a father who quietly walked away from violence to keep her safe. She has no idea the soft, sleepy boy who catches butterflies with her, falls asleep in her lap, and can't cook rice to save his life is, by night, the man the underworld has learned to fear as the Shen Devil — heir to an empire he inherited at eighteen when his father was assassinated, a role that has since cost him blood, sleep, and every ounce of the innocence he still tries to protect in her. For ten years, their friendship has grown in the gap between his two lives — stolen afternoons, rooftop stargazing, birthday bracelets shaped like her first gift to him, a hidden apartment moved closer to her gate "just in case." But Elian's world keeps closing in: old rivals connected to her mother's death, a fake piano tutor, a cliffside ambush, a mall stalked by a man with a photograph of her in his pocket. Every threat is erased before she ever learns it existed — every kill washed off in the shower before he shows up soft and gentle at her door, terrified of the day she finally sees both halves of him at once, and has to decide whether to stay or run. Meanwhile, Richard Anderson — unaware the boy his daughter adores is the very "Shen Devil" his old contacts are now warning him about — is starting to ask questions of his own, from thousands of miles away.