Instinct of the Heart: The Deadliest is Love

By Eric Ludwig Knipe

Not the way you'd imagine no screams, no sirens, no desperate prayers clawing at the smoke-choked sky. This was a quiet apocalypse, the kind that slipped into lungs and souls like a poison, leaving hollowed-out husks where people used to be. They called it the Reckoning, but it wasn't some grand cosmic justice. It was a ledger, balanced in blood.

The Syndicate had promised utopia.

They'd spun their lies in gold, their propaganda films shimmering with glass towers and children laughing in sun-dappled parks. But utopia, like all beautiful things, was a fossil by the time they dug it up. What rose instead were the Hives: sprawling, steel-plated factories where human hands assembled the future-clone soldiers, genetically perfected, their minds scrubbed clean of fear or doubt. The perfect army for a rotting world.

And then there was her.

She came in the night, a flicker of defiance in a world taught to kneel. A girl with a spray can in one hand and a lighter in the other, her shadow stretching like wings against the alley walls. They'd name her Phoenix later, once the fires began. But that night, she was just Lila Hart's daughter of a ghost, heir to a lie.

Her first act of rebellion wasn't grand. No manifesto, no explosions. Just four letters sprayed in neon green on the Syndicate's polished obsidian gates:

L I A R.

The guards laughed when they found it. A child's prank, they said. But the paint was laced with nanobots, microscopic insurgents that chewed through the Hive's security codes by dawn. By noon, the first clone woke up.

He was designated K-117, a soldier bred for obedience. But when he opened his eyes that day, he didn't recite his conditioning protocols. He asked a question.

"Why?"

The Syndicate didn't tolerate questions. They terminated K-117 an hour later, but the infection had already spread. Whispers slithered through the Hives. Codes glitched. And in the darkest corners of the city, a rumor ignited: The Original is here. The girl who cannot be copied.

They were right.

Lila Hart was no clone. She was something far more dangerous a flaw in the system. A child born from a mother who'd been both the Syndicate's brightest star and its sharpest thorn. Evelyn Hart had once stood on red carpets, an Oscar clutched in her hands, her smile sharp enough to cut glass. But fame, like fire, consumes. By the time she realized the Syndicate had scripted her entire life her roles, her marriage, even her daughter it was too late.

Or so they thought.

This story isn't about how the world ended. It's about how it began again in the cracks between control and chaos, between the lies we're fed and the truths we carve into our bones. It's about a mother who became a weapon, a daughter who became a revolution, and the fire that doesn't just destroy...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F9TNCS4K
• ISBN13: 9798285071631
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 764 Pages
• Weight: 2.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"