Before the First Prayer - THOMAS SHUTTS

For five years, Mira Lin has lived with a life that does not feel like her own.She suffers from violent nightmares, unexplained migraines, fragmented memories, and scars that seem to belong to a person she cannot remember. Every morning before the first prayer, she climbs the frozen steps of Chokhang Temple, searching for silence in the mountains. And every morning, the same mysterious, scarred stranger waits outside the shrine.He never speaks. He never approaches her.Until the day someone comes to kill her.The stranger moves with terrifying precision, defeating the attacker in seconds before disappearing into the mist. Mira finds only one clue: a heavy signet ring engraved with a single name-KAI. The moment she touches it, something buried inside her begins to awaken.The stranger is Julian Mercer, a man who has spent years hiding from the tragedy that destroyed his life. Five years earlier, a catastrophic highway accident left him scarred and nearly killed. A woman named Claire Bennett pulled him from a burning vehicle-but the explosion shattered her skull, erased her identity, and left her living under the name Mira Lin.Julian has been watching over her ever since, believing that protecting her is the only penance he can offer for surviving when others died.But Mira is not merely a survivor. As her memories return, the divided pieces of her identity begin to merge. She remembers the burning highway, the shattered metal, the woman she was, and the choice that changed both their lives: she did not save Julian because fate demanded it. She saved him because she chose to.When powerful enemies move against her and the past threatens to consume them both, Mira must decide whether to remain hidden behind the identity she built from amnesia or reclaim the woman she once was.Julian, meanwhile, must confront the guilt that has turned his survival into a living prison.Their final confrontation comes amid another devastating fire, forcing both survivors to choose between repeating the past and finally stepping beyond it. Mira saves those trapped inside the flames-and refuses to let Julian die simply because he believes he deserves punishment.As dawn finally breaks over Chokhang Temple, the woman called Mira becomes Claire again-not by recovering the past, but by choosing what comes next.**Before the First Prayer** is an atmospheric psychological mystery and romantic thriller about memory, survivor’s guilt, identity, sacrifice, and two wounded people learning that survival is not a debt to be repaid with suffering.