Respawn Point

She fixes other people's problems for a living. She never expected to become the answer to someone else's war.

Dana Kessler is twenty-nine, running on caffeine and dispatch-floor discipline, and quietly drowning - six years into a dead-end job, watching her mother's kidneys fail one dialysis appointment at a time. When her best friend leaves a beta VR rig on her doorstep with a note that says don't be a coward, Dana expects an hour of escapism.

She gets a war instead.

One log-in strands her at a ruined watchtower in Aldreth, a world at war, with no map, no interface, and a soldier's blade at her throat. The only reason she survives the hour is Lord-Marshal Alaric Vaine - a man who defies a direct execution order on instinct alone, and then can't quite explain why.

What Dana can do is read a supply line like a highway map and win a battle before the first arrow flies. What she can't do is control when she vanishes - sometimes mid-sentence, always without warning - or explain why three hours in her world costs three days in his. Every crossing costs her something real: a bruise that ages overnight, a debt she can't outrun in either world, a truth she's running out of time to tell the people who love her.

As the war closes in and the lies pile up on both sides of the waystone, Dana has to decide which life is the one she's actually living - and what she's willing to lose to keep choosing both.

A slow-burn romantasy about the war nobody sees coming, the love nobody expects to survive it, and the terrifying arithmetic of choosing, over and over, to log back in.

Perfect for readers who love competent heroines, steady and honorable love interests, portal-fantasy stakes that are real from page one, and a romance that has to be earned.