About Dead Air

She makes a living talking about murder. Then the wrong killer calls her live on air.

Every night, Daria Vale explores the darkest corners of the human mind. As the host of Dead Air, she’s built a career dissecting other people’s secrets while keeping her own carefully buried.

Until a stranger calls her show using a name she hasn’t answered to in years.

He knows what happened the night Daria killed a man.

And he makes her listen as someone she loves begs for her life.

When a familiar silver necklace arrives at the station, the nightmare becomes terrifyingly real.

Elias, her quietly attentive sound engineer, is the one person Daria trusts. He knows her habits, her secrets, and exactly how to make her feel safe.

What she doesn’t know is how much he enjoys making other people afraid.

As the threat closes in, Daria discovers that the man hunting her isn’t the only monster in her story. And the closer she gets to the truth about Elias, the harder it becomes to deny the darkness she’s spent years pretending doesn’t exist.

Because some secrets are worth killing to protect.

Others are worth killing to share.

Dead Air is a dark erotic suspense novella about violent secrets, dangerous intimacy, and the terrifying freedom of being truly known.

Detailed Content Notes

Want to know exactly what you’re getting into? Here’s the full menu. These notes include major story spoilers.

Violence, Crime, and Horror

• A woman’s captivity and apparent murder: Her pleading, threats against her, a slap, struggling, and disturbing wet, gurgling sounds are heard in a recording played during a live true-crime radio broadcast. Her body is not recovered by the ending.
• Threatening personal evidence: A missing woman’s silver cat necklace is delivered to the protagonist as evidence of violence against her.
• Stalking, intimidation, and blackmail: Anonymous threatening calls, monitoring of the protagonist’s workplace and police movements, demands for a recorded murder confession, and threats of public exposure and professional ruin.
• Missing persons: A separate unsolved disappearance, including a grieving mother desperately searching for her daughter.
• Past violent assault: A college student is grabbed and threatened with a knife held against her throat.
• Morally ambiguous self-defense: The protagonist recounts fatally stabbing her attacker, including a deliberate second stab after she had an opportunity to escape.
• Sexually aggressive fraternity culture: References to college parties, alcohol, and men engaging in unwanted touching.
• Graphic knife violence: A knife slash across the ribs, throat-grabbing and physical restraint, multiple deliberate stabbings, extensive bleeding, prolonged dying, and a corpse left at the scene.
• Remorseless killing: A male lead with a disturbingly calm capacity for violence and a strongly implied history of serious brutality.
• Criminal concealment: Characters deliberately choose not to report a killing.

Psychological Darkness

• Traumatic shock, grief, survivor guilt, shame, emotional dissociation, trembling, difficulty breathing, repeated dry heaving, and crying after witnessing extreme violence.
• Moral uncertainty about killing, including the disturbing possibility of having enjoyed an act of violence.
• Attraction to a dangerous, unrepentant murderer, with the protagonist knowingly choosing intimacy despite understanding his capacity for brutality.
• Dark and irreverent humor involving murder, blood, death, and the practicalities of cleanup.

Sexual Content

• An established adult sexual relationship and an explicit, mutually initiated sexual encounter involving nudity, kissing, penetrative intercourse, and orgasms.
• Consensual rougher intimacy, including wrist pinning, forceful gripping likely to leave marks, scratching, and sex against a wall.
• Sex immediately following a graphic murder, inside the same warehouse, with the dead body nearby.
• Bloodstained clothing, dried blood on the characters’ skin during intimacy, and sexual activity involving a partner with a freshly bandaged knife wound.

Other

• Strong profanity and adult language.