BORROWED TIME: THE DEVIL'S EXECUTOR

In a city where evil thrives unchecked, Cressida Halloway has spent twenty-three years invisible—a nonprofit accountant whose quiet existence is punctuated by daily humiliation from her supervisor and haunted by memories of brutal school bullying that left her brother comatose. When she witnesses gang members nearly beat an innocent teenager to death while bystanders film instead of helping, something inside her shatters. That night, the devil appears—not with horns and fire, but wearing her dead father's face. The offer is simple: supernatural abilities to excel at anything she attempts, the power to finally make the world better. The cost? Half her remaining lifespan. Cressida has perhaps twenty years left. She accepts without hesitation. What she doesn't know: the devil's gift transforms recipients slowly into Hollow Ones—creatures that feed on human suffering. With each villain she punishes, each corrupt official she exposes, each predator she eliminates, Cressida loses more of her humanity. Her reflection grows distorted. Her shadow moves independently. Her dreams fill with insatiable hunger for pain. Enter Thaddeus Corwin—an enigmatic paranormal investigator hired by the city's elite to stop the "Nightfall Killer," a vigilante whose victims are found with their sins carved into their flesh and their faces frozen in expressions of absolute terror. Thaddeus knows what Cressida is becoming because he's bound to a celestial entity hunting Hollow Ones before they fully transform and begin indiscriminate slaughter. He's supposed to kill her. Instead, he finds himself falling for the broken woman behind the monster—the one still fighting to remain human while her borrowed time runs out. As Cressida's transformation accelerates and the devil's true purpose emerges, she must choose: complete her mission to cleanse the city and lose herself entirely, or break the contract and die, leaving the world as corrupt as she found it.