Forged Fates Synopsis
Lukas Novak, a successful architect and community leader, appreciates his life's richness. Madly in love with the beautiful Nicky Winters, he’s close friends with the charismatic Adam Lindmark, a revered art conservationist, and Natalie Collins, Lindmark’s lover, a woman with rare intelligence and beauty.
Lindmark and Winters are murdered days apart, tearing Novak’s life apart. His darkness grows when finding that Winters, Lindmark, and Collins are not who he believed they were. He’s thrown into a vortex of art forgery, greed, jealousy, lust, and vengeance.
Things worsen. He’s the leading suspect in Lindmark’s killing, arrested and charged with Winters’ murder. His architectural clients abandon him, destroying his practice, and one of his favorite clients is killed by a gunshot to the head.
Fighting through his grief and anguish, with the support of his colleague, Liz Bowers, he’s determined to prove his innocence and find the killers. Unraveling the murders is complicated. Are they related? Does someone hate him so much that they would try to ruin his life? Maybe a jealous husband or a wealthy Saudi family is seeking revenge and killed Lindmark. Or perhaps Collins is the murderer? Did she also murder Winters? If Novak can find the reason for the killings, it may lead to those responsible.
Despite his heroic efforts, time and good luck are running out, and few believe he’ll find the killers before he’s tortured and brutally murdered like Lindmark.
A Chapter to Preston’s Forged Fates Sequal
October 1, 2021 — Bay City, Michigan
Stevie Ling
“Come on, Stevie, let’s get moving,” she said to herself at 5:30 in the morning. After showering, Stevie Ling looked at herself in the mirror. “What are you doing?” She said while attempting to put on lipstick and a slight amount of eye makeup. Stevie rarely wore makeup and questioned why she was doing it this morning. She was meeting her architect later today, and she knew that answered her question.
Stevie didn’t like admitting that somehow, someway, she was attracted to this man. She’d been with men over the years but never drawn to them. One way or another, they served a purpose. There was never any attraction like she felt for him. Laughing to herself, she’d always called him by his last name, never using his given name.
She wondered, did he even think of her as a woman? She doubted he did. However, there was something in the way he looked at her. She wasn’t sure what it meant. Even if he was attracted to her, she didn’t know if she was capable of letting anyone into her life.
Finishing her eye makeup and thinking she did a pretty good job considering her lack of practice. Stevie looked somewhat like her mother, but if you looked at pictures of her grandmother, you’d swear they were sisters. Her grandmother was Vietnamese and came to the U.S. after the Vietnam War. She’d married a man Stevie had never met. In fact, Stevie wasn’t sure if her mother had ever met him. Apparently, that ran in the family. Stevie had never met her father, and that’s why her last name was Ling. It was her grandmother’s maiden name, her mother’s name, and now hers. It was all part of her screwed-up story. Stevie’s mother loved Stevie Nicks, the Rock and Roll star with the band Fleetwood Mac. So much so that she named her only child Stevie.
It was ironic that she looked nothing like Stevie Nicks, a short, petite blonde. Stevie was tall and slender. A bemused smile crossed her face while studying herself: high cheekbones, dark eyes, dark eyebrows, and short black hair. Stevie wasn’t used to smiling. No, it wasn’t ironic, she thought. Her mother wasn’t intelligent or thoughtful enough to be ironic. It was just the way it happened.
There was no time to think about her mother or the past; Stevie focused on her future. For her, it’s always about the future and being independent: financially and emotionally. She reminded herself coldly, clearly to never to forget. And yet, here she was applying lipstick and eye shadow. She shook her head; she must be crazy, she thought.
Meeting today with him was to review the changes she wanted in the architectural drawings for a commercial complex project she was responsible for building in Bay City, Michigan, along the Saginaw River. It was over 100,000 square feet, including condominiums, high-end shops, and two restaurants. It was her fifth complex she’d constructed in various places across the country.
The other projects were completed on time, and the one in Bay City would be no different. Well, there was one difference, she admitted to herself, him. He was the reason she questioned her sanity. He never seemed to notice her other than the person who hired him to design the complex.
Reminding herself again, clear and cold, don’t get emotionally attached to anyone. And Stevie never had, until now.