Neon Bruise (The Fever Circuit)
She came to bury his family. She didn't plan to want him.
Lexi Huang arrives at the Fever Circuit - one of the largest music festivals in the American West - with press credentials, her dead mother's camera, and a single mission: finish the investigation that destroyed her mother's life.
Ten years ago, photojournalist Min Huang uncovered labor exploitation and financial fraud at the heart of Maddox Events, the family empire behind the festival. The Maddox legal team crushed her. Buried the story. Drained her savings. Min died in a studio apartment in Oakland with a box of evidence under her bed and a camera she refused to sell.
Now Lexi is inside the machine, documenting what hides beneath the spectacle - unbadged construction workers, pharmaceutical shipments routed through shell companies, suppressed safety reports. She has her mother's flash drive. She has a source willing to talk. And she has a deadline measured in days, not months.
What she doesn't have is a plan for Dex Maddox.
The eldest son of the man who destroyed her mother, Dex is the festival's head of production - controlled, strategic, and carrying a secret that rewrites everything Lexi thought she knew. For six years, he has been quietly building a federal case against his own father, feeding evidence to a DOJ contact, all while protecting his younger brother Callum from being framed as the operation's fall guy.
When Dex recognizes Lexi's name on the credential list, he offers her a position as the festival's official photographer. It's a leash disguised as access - and she takes it, because access is the only currency that matters.
Over eight days and nights in the Mojave Desert, they circle each other - adversaries, reluctant allies, then something far more dangerous. Every conversation is a negotiation. Every touch is a detonation they both see coming and neither can stop. Their attraction is tangled in betrayal, inherited grief, and the discovery that Lexi's mother had an affair with Garrett Maddox before the investigation began - a pattern Lexi is now repeating with devastating precision.
As the festival's final night approaches, Lexi must decide: publish now and risk destroying the one person inside the Maddox family who chose to fight, or trust the man whose name is synonymous with everything she came here to burn.
The desert doesn't care about your reasons. It only cares about what you leave behind.
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