CIPHERED HEARTS CHRONICLES • BOOK 3

Lion City Eclipse

By Leo Vescari

Two men built to serve opposing empires. One burning city. And a bond forged in the dark that neither flag can claim.

Arthur Leigh has spent his career proving that competence matters more than ancestry. As a mixed-heritage engineer in colonial Singapore, he has poured his identity into concrete and steel, designing fortifications he believes are impregnable. But when Japanese forces sweep across the Malay Peninsula with terrifying speed, Artie watches everything he built—and everything he believed—begin to crack. The fortress was never as solid as the man who designed it.

Kenji Sakamoto never chose his role. Born in Singapore, fluent in four languages, he has been conscripted as a Japanese military translator—a collaborator against his own will, serving an occupation he finds morally reprehensible. When a chance encounter in the ruins of Fort Canning brings him face-to-face with the British engineer whose fortifications he helped destroy, the two men must make an impossible calculation: trust a stranger from the enemy's side, or die alone in the rubble.

Escaping through miles of hidden tunnels beneath a city already burning, Artie and Kenji navigate Japanese patrols, crumbling infrastructure, and the systematic atrocities of the Sook Ching purge. Every step deeper underground forces a reckoning—with their complicity, their convictions, and each other. Betrayal could come from any direction. The window for escape narrows by the hour. And the intelligence each man carries makes both of them targets.

What begins as brutal pragmatism becomes something neither man has language for—a loyalty that outlasts empire, forged in darkness and cemented by sacrifice. But survival is only the first test. The world waiting above ground has no category for what they've become to each other. Whether it will let them remain that way is a question the sea cannot answer.

A wartime enemies-to-lovers historical MM romance set against the fall of Singapore, featuring forced proximity, moral reckoning, and love built from the wreckage of empire.