On New Year’s Eve, the seaside resort of Illyria glows under champagne bubbles and drifting lanterns, all pretending the coming year will be different. But in the hour before midnight, time folds. Fireworks thud like a pulse across the shoreline, and the world snaps back to the start. The guests never notice. The clock never hesitates. Only two lovers remember.
Adrian and Marin once swore they’d never lose each other, not to death, not to the sea. That vow, made in desperation, has become a cage: an endless loop where desire, grief, and memory collide. Every reset traps them in the same brittle hour an hour of confessions, hunger, and fear they still refuse to name. The harder they push against it, the more Illyria shifts around them, hallways bending as if the ocean listens.
Together they search for the moment everything broke: when loyalty turned into a binding, when a promise hardened into a curse, when the truth slipped beneath the waves. They must untangle the past they spent years trying to smother or risk being swallowed by the loop for good.
As midnight creeps closer, Adrian and Marin confront the one question they can’t run from:
If breaking the vow means breaking their hearts, which will they choose?
***
As the clock counts down in this story, its forbidden passion and creeping terror echo the haunting heartbeat that binds the entire Fireworks and Shadows series.
On the final night of the year, the line between longing and fear blurs. Fireworks flare overhead while something restless moves beneath the surface lovers drawn together by desire, timing, and the darkness that lingers after the light fades. From haunted houses to towns that remember too much, Fireworks and Shadows unravels what happens when connection turns into invitation, and love insists on surviving what should be left behind. Each story burns briefly, beautifully, before midnight falls and nothing is the same again.
