In a city where secrets are currency and trust is a liability, Alex "Axel" Reid has survived by staying invisible. A fixer who solves problems for people who can't go to the police, he's built his life on being too small to notice and too useful to kill. But when a powerful man is found dead in Alex's apartment, invisibility is no longer an option. Someone is setting him up. The murder is just the beginning—a thread in a tapestry of corruption that reaches into the city's police, its corporations, and its criminal underground. Every door is slamming shut. Every ally he finds is already compromised. And the deeper Alex digs, the more he realizes the conspiracy isn't about framing him—it's about using him. The murder weapon isn't a gun. It's a drug. A pharmaceutical nightmare that's been tested on the city's poorest communities, creating addiction and death for profit. Alex's mother was investigating the same conspiracy when she was killed in a hit-and-run. Now he's carrying on her work, unraveling a web of lies that connects a shadowy corporation, a corrupt city council, and a network of criminals who control everything that happens in the dark. Each answer breeds new questions. Each alliance crumbles. And as Alex peels back layer after layer, he discovers the conspiracy reaches into places he can't touch—places where the powerful play games with human lives. To survive, he'll have to become something he never wanted to be: the center of a storm. A target. A man willing to burn everything down to find the truth. But storms don't ask permission to destroy. And Alex knows that when lightning finally strikes, he might be the one who burns.