To save the world from starvation, she must trust a man whose family created the famine.

Dr. Ava Rostova is a brilliant botanist on the verge of a breakthrough that could protect the world's food supply from any threat. But when the Obsidian data dump reveals her humanitarian project is secretly funded by the same conspiracy that shattered the globe, her life's work becomes her greatest fear. A cryptic message from a ghost in the machine confirms the horrifying truth: her science isn't a shield; it's a weapon.

Her mysterious contact is Henry Volkov, an exiled scientist and the last heir to one of Obsidian's founding families. Haunted by the sins of his ancestors, he reveals a truth far more terrifying than global surveillance: Project Ceres is a plan to engineer a worldwide famine, with Ava's genetically modified crops as the only cure. To expose them, they must steal the proof from a ghost server hidden deep within Ava's own high-security lab.

Forced into an uneasy alliance, they are a volatile mix of scientific brilliance and inherited guilt. On the run in a world that wants them dead, the brilliant botanist and the haunted defector find themselves drawn together by a magnetic, dangerous attraction. But as Ava falls for the man behind the infamous name, she uncovers his family's darkest secret in the stolen data-a monstrous truth about the real purpose of her work and a betrayal that cuts deeper than any lie.

With assassins closing in, Henry makes a devastating sacrifice, leaving Ava alone with a mission and the ghost of a future that can never be. Now, she must find the scattered remnants of a broken resistance, because the war for the world's food supply is over, and the war for humanity itself has just begun.