Shadows of Starlight: Vigilante’s Shard

Sarah Miller, a burned-out foster-system survivor working the pediatric oncology ward, stumbles onto a syndicate killing and is marked for capture the same night she’s rescued by Samuel, a vigilante who has stalked her route home for three weeks while hunting the crime boss who murdered his sister.

Forced into a safehouse together, Sarah refuses to be either a possession or a rescue project: she negotiates explicit consent rules, grounding protocols for Samuel’s dissociative rages, and a partnership of matched competence—her knowledge of the city’s old maintenance tunnels, his ability to clear armed men.

As the threat closes on the children’s hospital, the two must dismantle the syndicate alongside a skeptical federal agent while Sarah insists that protection which removes her choice is just another threat.

Tropes: obsessive stalker hero turned protector, vigilante/anti-hero love interest, forced proximity in a safehouse, wounded caretaker heroine, protector vs. possession, touch-her-and-die devotion, grumpy dangerous man / warm nurturing woman, found family and rescued children, consent-forward negotiated intimacy, there was only one bed energy / cohabitation under threat, revenge quest, trauma-bonded couple (what these mean)