Right Beside You

Ava Frost has a gun in her hands, a rooftop under her sneakers, and one name in her head: Wakeem, the man who shattered her and still walks free, laughing on the sidewalk below. She has wanted him dead every single day. What stops her is not the safety catch. It is Dempsey Alsina, the boy she loves, stepping out of the dark behind her and folding her into his chest without asking one question.

Dempsey is sweet with her and lethal without her. In daylight he is all easy laughter, matching sneakers, and a dog named June; after dark he runs with a crew that handles problems permanently, and he keeps two secrets from Ava: the body count, and his own promise that Wakeem will not stay breathing. Ava keeps secrets too, like the hate she feeds in silence and the years of her past she refuses to explain. Together they build a warm, ordinary love on top of an extraordinary pile of lies.

Then the threats begin. A prom picture of the whole crew arrives in a box on a doorstep. Anonymous texts follow, then a private number that knows exactly which of the boss's workers to kill first. At a fancy dinner, an envelope lands on the table with faces crossed out. Bullets come through the front door at night, and Dempsey hides Ava in a secret room he built without telling her. Someone out there is studying them, counting them, and cutting the circle smaller.

The clues point somewhere none of them think to look. The enemy knows Ava's mother. The enemy parks a tinted car on their street and stands in the trees while they walk the beach. The enemy sends Dempsey's boss a box of candy with a note, revenge is sweet, in the same signature that arrived right before Dempsey's brother was murdered. And when a rival girl turns up beaten, then missing, Ava starts to suspect the threats and the disappearance are one and the same.

Because this stalker does not want Dempsey's empire. She wants Ava. She has wanted her since grade school, before the streets, before Dempsey, before anyone stood in the way, and every crossed-out face and every bullet is her idea of winning Ava back. She recruits the lovesick and the desperate, blackmails the ones who falter, and stays invisible behind hired hands.

By the time Ava understands what is hunting them, headlights are filling the windshield. She survives the crash and the surgery, but the danger follows her straight through the hospital doors: an alarm screams, a figure in black carries her out of her own room, and Dempsey hunts the intruder down a dead-end corridor with a gun in his hand, refusing to lose the only thing that has ever been his.

Right Beside You is a slow-burn romantic suspense about a couple who survive the streets only to be hunted by something patient, a crew that keeps secreting betrayal, and a love so constant it makes the perfect target. The scariest thing in the dark is not the enemy at the door. It is the devotion that never leaves.