Rowan Vale has spent her life holding everyone else together while quietly falling apart. Haunted by a manipulative mother and years of buried trauma, she's finally pushed to the edge-until one night, she nearly doesn't survive. It's Eli Kade who finds her. The gruff, guarded ICU physician with a past he keeps locked behind steel walls. A man trained to save lives on battlefields and in intensive care units, but never prepared to let someone save him. What begins as fragile trust quickly ignites into something darker-hungry touches in the shadows, stolen kisses that turn into nights where neither of them can breathe without the other. Rowan learns how to feel alive again in his arms. Eli learns what it means to lose control in the best possible way. But when Eli's own demons resurface, his PTSD threatens to destroy the one thing he's fought hardest for. Pushing Rowan away feels like survival-until the silence between them becomes unbearable. This is a story of two broken souls learning that love isn't about being flawless, but about fighting your way back-again and again. By the final page, Rowan and Eli will discover that not even fate can be rewritten: through forgiveness, through forever, through a promise sealed in vows. Dark. Tender. Relentless. Fate Never Asked Me First is a haunting, slow-burn dark romance about survival, obsession, second chances, and a love fierce-and filthy-enough to demand forever.