Welcome to the Blackwood Institute. Where the mind is the ultimate weapon, and your memories belong to them.
Dr. Julian Vance is a machine of pure logic-a brilliant neuro-biophysicist who has buried his past beneath cold, unyielding precision. Evangeline "Eva" Rossi is a master behavioral profiler, a human polygraph who reads lies in the blink of an eye. Forced together as research fellows at the secretive, gothic Blackwood Institute on a sovereign maritime island, their friction is instantaneous and volatile.
Their assignment: the Veritas Protocol. A groundbreaking research project analyzing cognitive baselines. But when their primary test subject-a deeply fractured man known only as Subject 7-reveals intimate, impossible secrets about Julian and Eva's private lives, the academic facade cracks.
The Institute is hiding something in the green-phosphorus glow of its subterranean labs. Someone is watching them. And the terrifying, magnetic attraction pulling Julian and Eva together might not be chemistry at all-it might be engineered.
In a world where every touch carries the weight of betrayal, who can you trust when you can't even trust your own mind?