When an ordinary girl crosses a fallen angel, love is the most dangerous sin.
Elara Wren lives in a quiet coastal town where nothing ever happens—until one stormy night, she meets a stranger by the lake. He’s ethereal, cold and mind-staggeringly beautiful, yet something about him is off, like light made into darkness.
What she doesn’t know is that he was once one of Heaven’s most formidable protectors—banished for breaking divine law. Now he dwells among the living, a wanderer never to rest in the world he can’t reach. But when he sees Elara, something shifts. She’s all he’s lost—innocence, heat, agency—and everything he’s had to keep from wanting.
As their paths cross, Elara begins to experience bizarre breaches in what is real—reflections that whisper secrets, black feathers that drift from the sky, dreams where he says her name. With the closer she is to him, the more the line between Heaven and Earth blurs… and the more fatal their connection becomes.
Because the love for her could annihilate what grace he has left.
And to love him could potentially cost Elara her soul. Before the Fall is a contemporary dark romance about sin, salvation, and the kind of love that defies both Heaven and Hell.

They ground to a rough halt. Stone and dust poured up to meet them, and the shadows parted with a reluctant hiss.


Cael was the first to push himself up, wings flaring and pulling back sharply with pain. This place… he knew the air. Metallic. Old. Alive.


Elara pushed up beside him, coughing. "Where are we?"


"Far below anything that remembers Heaven."


Dim emergency lights flickered overhead, but they did little to penetrate the darkness. It looked like a disused subway station — platforms submerged, tracks gnawed into rust.


But under the rot… symbols hum faintly over every inch of floor, walls, and ceiling. Engraved in the tiles. Carved into the tiles. Painted beneath peeling ads. Written into the bones of the walls.


Elara moved toward one, reaching out.


Her fingers brushed the symbol — and the station powered on.


Golden lines of script bled across the room like veins under skin igniting, pulsing and stacking faster than any eye of flesh could follow.


Elara hit the dirt, holding her hand. "It—burned. But it didn't hurt."


It was a script he hadn't laid his eyes on for hundreds of years. Divine, yes — but old. Old as war. Older than Heaven's rules.


"Elara," he whispered, "this place knows you."


Confusion and terror and something near grief warped her face.


"I can read it. Not all of it… but enough."


The glyphs nearest her began to stabilize into one coherent phrase:


Her eyes widened. "Cael… does that mean me?" 


He longed to lie – to deny, to shield her from the truth baring its teeth at them – but the arrival of Seraphine had obliterated the last of his fantasies.


"It wasn't like you were just a martyr," he said quietly.


"You were a weapon that they shaped in the shadows. A force that could reshape the war. I severed the chain, so they clipped my wings."


 "You are more than anyone probably ever intended you to be."


Her voice was raw and her throat tight.


"And you went and did all that without telling me."


"Because when you wake up from this," he said with slow, deliberate steps, "heaven is coming to finish what they started."


The lights pulsed one final time, brighter — then the platform beneath them rolled.


A distant roar was heard echoing through the tunnels-metallic and hungry.


Elara's heart was pounding so loud Cael could hear it in the air.


Cael's wings were restored in an instant — black feathers raining sparks onto the earth.


Chapter 17 - Chapter 17