Voracious

**Author:** Leigh Rivers **Estimated Reading Time:** 42 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of silence, the violence that lives inside families, and the question of whether love can survive when two people have been broken by everyone who was supposed to protect them.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who can sit with darkness without looking away. This is a story about survival, sexual violence, and the long shadow of abuse, told through two people who find each other in the wreckage and keep finding each other even when everything conspires to tear them apart.

Stacey Rhodes has been keeping secrets since she was fourteen years old. The first secret was the worst one, the one she carried to her father and watched him refuse to believe. After that, secrecy stopped being a choice and became a way of breathing. She learned to smile at family dinners, to laugh with her stepbrother in public, to fold herself into the shape of a girl who was fine. The second secret was different. It was not a wound but a refuge: a year of hidden love with Kade Mitchell, the boy everyone warned her about, the son of a convicted psychopath, the only person who ever made her feel safe. Kade has his own inheritance of darkness. He grew up believing he was his father's son in the worst possible way, that the violence and intensity inside him were proof of something broken beyond repair. Stacey was the one person who looked at him and saw something worth saving. For nearly a year, they built a private world out of stolen moments: camping trips, a cave in Greece, two Dobermann puppies, matching tattoos. They recorded everything, as if documenting their happiness could protect it. Then a single anonymous message destroyed it all. An edited video, a betrayal that was not a betrayal, and Kade walked away believing the worst. He swallowed every pill he could find. He survived, barely, and fell into the hands of Bernadette Sawyer, a corrupt police chief who spent two years drugging him, selling him, and stripping away every part of him that remembered how to be human. Stacey, meanwhile, was delivered back to the stepbrother who had been abusing her since she was fourteen. Chris, the monster her father refused to see, the one who beat her until she lost the daughter she and Kade had secretly conceived. The daughter Kade never knew about until it was too late. This is a novel about what happens when every system meant to protect you fails. The police, the family, the people who are supposed to love you. It is about the violence that hides in ordinary houses…