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They say you can’t outrun your past.
But I wasn’t just trying to escape. I was trying to disappear.
When Elaina arrives in a coastal town in northern Spain, she carries nothing but a false name, the weight of a broken past, and secrets she can’t afford to let slip. On the run from a life she never chose, she unexpectedly lands a job at a castle-turned-luxury hotel. But what was meant to be a temporary hiding place soon becomes something far more entangling.
A hotel thrumming with energy. A staff village pulsing with tension, fleeting attachments, blooming friendships, and faces far too curious for comfort. Elaina tries to keep her head down and her secrets close—but something about this magnetic new world slowly begins to pull her in.
Then there’s Orlando.
Distant. Mysterious. Unreadable.
Yet despite his broody presence, Elaina finds herself drawn in by his captivating gravity—even as his penetrating gaze seems to see right through the deepest, darkest parts of her she’s spent years trying to bury. His shadowed connection to the hotel’s elusive owner—whose interest in Elaina is as unexpected as it is unsettling—runs deeper than the surface suggests.
Soon, Elaina begins to realise something much darker is at play, lurking in the shadows of her new life.
The longer she stays, the more the edges begin to blur—between safety and danger, trust and suspicion, survival and surrender, hiding and being seen.
You can run.
You can change your name.
You can change your life.
But the past will always find a way to claw you back into its merciless grip.
2025 Amara Phoenix
