NEED

Marie Lawrence is the CEO of Heliox Consortium, the company that controls access to the Rift — a tear in spacetime and the only bridge to the alien world beyond. She built the bonding program. She wrote the protocols. She approved the facilities.

Then, after an assassination attempt, her own Board of Directors votes to put her inside it.

For six months, Marie is confined to a facility near CERN with a Kaelith changeling named Thrykor, assigned to protect her. No face. No voice. No form she can name. And when he begins to transform in response to her, the rules she designed stop meaning anything at all.

At the same time, half a billion euros is moving through Heliox, and the numbers do not add up. The deeper Marie digs, the clearer it becomes: someone inside her company is hiding something big enough to kill for.

What begins as enforced protection becomes something far more intimate. Control shifts. Desire takes hold. And Marie learns that surrender — real surrender — feels nothing like weakness.

NEED is a slow-burn sci-fi romance about power, protection, and the difference between what we want and what we can’t survive without.