They don't scream. They walk.Nine days on a new world, and Dr Maren Cole is the only one who sees it. Soil that heals overnight. A flower that turns to follow her across a bench. Dawn birds that cut out all at once — as though something vast has just turned its head to listen. Then a girl vanishes from inside the wall. No body. No trail. Just the shape of where a person used to be. Nobody believes her. Nobody ever has. And the last man on Elpis she wants believing her is Kade Bishop — the colony's scarred, shut-down security chief, six years spent holding a line and letting nobody in, certain that a woman who wants to understand the thing eating them will get every one of them killed. He wants to wall it out. She wants to know what it is. They agree on nothing, and neither of them can stop reaching for the other while the count drops every night and the thing on the ridge keeps its patient, terrible schedule. By the time Kade works out that she is the one thing he'd burn the whole colony down before he lost — it knows it too. Because Elpis doesn't kill the people it takes. It keeps them. And it wants her most of all. The Longlight Colony · Book One of three. A dark, slow-burn science-fiction romance — reluctant allies, forced proximity, and a love forged against a planet that loves you to death. Full-length, dual-POV, explicit on-page heat. A hard-won happily-for-now, and a last page that opens the war. Contains colony horror, grief, and losses that cost. For adult readers.