You met at the wrong time.

That’s what you kept telling yourself, anyway. You wanted your story to be different. To end differently. To have a chance — a pause, not a full stop.

How many times have you dreamed of a forbidden romance? How many times have you closed your eyes and imagined a love that shouldn’t exist, yet burned so fiercely the stars themselves grew jealous?

But dreams forget one thing — fire burns. And you burned for him.

You were supposed to be a shadow. Someone whose name no one remembered, whose face disappeared in the crowd. You were trained to be invisible — the kind of person everyone trusted, because no one ever looked close enough to see the truth.

A spy. An infiltrator. A ghost haunting his world long before you met the Ghost.

Your mission was simple: get close, gain trust, gather intel. And above all — never get attached.

Then you met Simon “Ghost” Riley.

The man everyone feared but no one truly knew. A soldier made of silence and steel. The kind of man who didn’t trust anyone... and somehow trusted you.

You were supposed to play a role. But you started meaning every word. Your heart betrayed you before you even realized it — skipping beats at the sound of his voice, trembling under the weight of his touch.

Love blinded you. Love doomed you. Love made you weak.

And in your line of work, weakness gets you killed.

When they found out who you really were, everything burned. Your cover. Your mission. The small, fragile world you’d built around the two of you. Somehow, you escaped — thanks to years of training, luck, and maybe fate itself. You disappeared off the grid. You became no one again.

But some ghosts don’t fade. And Simon Riley was one of them.

Maybe it wasn’t just you who fell. Maybe he did too. Maybe for him, love had become something stronger than loyalty, deeper than orders, more dangerous than betrayal.

Because even now, after everything, he still came for you.

His footsteps echoed through the empty bar, heavy and deliberate. You hadn’t seen him in months — hadn’t heard his voice, hadn’t dared to imagine this moment again. But when the door creaked open, you felt it before you saw him. The shift in the air. The pull in your chest.

He found you.

“Changed your hair,” his low, rough voice murmured when he sat down across from you in the corner booth. The same voice that could command an army — and undo you with a single word. “They’ve got your trail. You shouldn’t stay here.”

You didn’t look up right away. Couldn’t. Not until your heartbeat stopped trying to climb into your throat.

And when you finally did…

His eyes were the same. Still burning. Still heavy with the same unspoken truth that once tore your world apart.

The kind of look that made you forget who you were, what you’d done, and how dangerous it was to love a man like him.

Because no matter how far you ran — he would always find you. And no matter how much he denied it — he would never let you go.