Ghost doesn't feel. He processes.

Four years ago, the man he loved sold his classified work to a broker and got eleven people killed. Ghost buried his name, buried the memories, buried everything that made him human. Now he's Lakefront's hacker — brilliant, untouchable, and running on caffeine and code in a basement full of screens.

Then the crew pulls a DEA agent out of a Toledo warehouse, and the agent won't stop smiling.

Trip Valdez has been beaten, starved, and held captive for six weeks. He should be broken. Instead, he cracks jokes. He makes the crew laugh. He leaves food where Ghost will find it and sits in Ghost's space without crowding it and learns the difference between the silences that mean leave me alone and the silences that mean stay.

Ghost doesn't know what to do with a man who sees through walls he's spent four years building.

Trip doesn't know how to stop.

The network that caged Trip is run by the same man who destroyed Ghost. And he wants Ghost back.Core of Static is a dark MM romance about a man who turned himself into nothing and the man who finds something still there.

Heat Level: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (explicit)
Tropes: Rescuer x Rescued Forced Proximity Sunshine x Grump He Falls First Touch-Starved Neurodivergent MC Found Family
Ending: HEA

Trigger Warnings:

The pain and kink elements in the sex scenes are consensual, desired, and framed as part of how Ghost's body processes pleasure, not as a symptom of brokenness. The book draws an explicit line between pain that is chosen and pain that is weaponized.

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