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The Woman Of Fire
She was twenty-one years old when her parents decided what her life was worth.
Victoria Stevens thought she knew what family meant. She was wrong.
For five billion dollars, her parents handed her over to a secret facility where human life is nothing more than an experiment. Now, trapped in a nightmare she never chose, Victoria must endure horrors that threaten to destroy everything she once was.
But what happens when the people who try to break you create something they can no longer control?
Victoria Stevens thought she knew what family meant. She was wrong.
For five billion dollars, her parents handed her over to a secret facility where human life is nothing more than an experiment. Now, trapped in a nightmare she never chose, Victoria must endure horrors that threaten to destroy everything she once was.
But what happens when the people who try to break you create something they can no longer control?
345 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 2, 2026
About the author
MALIK A. AHMED
1 book1 followerMalik A. Ahmed is an independent fiction author writing across science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, mysteries, and psychological suspense. After establishing a foundation in digital storytelling, short stories, and crime suspense serials, he transitioned to the global English-language market to create immersive, high-stakes fictional worlds. Guided by a passion for deep mysteries, morally complex characters, and atmospheric storytelling, his work blends suspense, emotion, and imagination to captivate readers around the world.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 15, 2026
MY GOODREADS REVIEW
Review Title:
She Woke Up In 1400 And I Have Not Recovered Yet 🔥⏳
Star Rating:
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Review:
Let me start with the sentence I could not shake: "I often wonder what changed me more, the experiments, or the betrayal of the people I once called family." 💔 That line does something to a person. It set the temperature for the entire novel and I never quite cooled off.
The Woman Of Fire, book one of the Eyes Of Fire series, introduces us to Victoria Stevens, and I want to talk about her for a moment because she is the reason this book works so beautifully. 🧠 Victoria is a conservator. Restoration is her love language. She sees patterns where other people see noise, she details things chronologically, and she memorizes with a precision that borders on devotional. Ahmed does something clever here. He does not hand her a sword or a superpower. He hands her a disciplined mind, and then he puts her somewhere that mind is the only thing she has left. Her ability to hold information becomes her saving grace and the single thread she clings to when everything else is stripped away.
It starts with a knock at the door. 🚪 Her parents are practically glowing. Such a wonderful opportunity, they tell her. The Prometheus Initiative. Underneath that name, in smaller print, the real description: Advanced Bio-Tech and Cognitive Research. Victoria's instincts scream at her. She ignores them, because they are her parents and she does not want to disappoint them. I read that section with my jaw tight, because so many of us understand exactly that particular flavor of obedience. 😣
What follows is not an orientation. She is swept away under tight security, then moved again like a captive being marched through unfamiliar terrain, and when the hood finally comes off she is standing inside the mountain at Groom Lake. 🏔️ Nothing about it makes sense to her, and Ahmed keeps us right there beside her in that disorientation. No one is supposed to know a facility exists inside that mountain, and Ahmed renders it with cold, clinical dread. She is sealed. She is rewritten. She is broken down into a designation, and they are genuinely convinced they can erase who she was.
They were wrong. ⚡
Here is where the journey of V21, or rather V.I.C.T.O.R.I.A., truly begins, and it is impressive work. When the final experiment tears time open and she awakens in 1400, masked and altered and feared as the woman with the eyes of fire, the novel expands rather than collapses. 🕯️ A lesser book would have lost control of that pivot. This one uses it to ask sharper questions about identity, memory, and what is actually left of a person after everyone who was supposed to protect her decided she was expendable.
The writing is atmospheric and deliberate. 📖 The suspense is psychological, built out of dread and information rather than noise. And the momentum is honestly ridiculous. I kept promising myself one more chapter, which is a promise I have never once kept in my life.
It is genuinely hard to say more without wandering into spoiler country, so I will stop myself here. But I will say this much: that ending. 😮 Priceless. Absolutely priceless. It reframes things in a way I did not see coming, and I sat with the book closed in my lap for a good while afterward.
If you enjoy science fiction with a thriller pulse, morally complicated characters, government facilities that make your skin crawl, and a heroine whose greatest weapon is her memory, this one belongs on your shelf. 🔥
I am completely here for book two. Completely. ⏳
Thank you, Malik A. Ahmed, and VoraciousReaders for the gifted copy of this book. It was a genuine pleasure and I cannot wait to see where this series goes. 🙏📚
Review Title:
She Woke Up In 1400 And I Have Not Recovered Yet 🔥⏳
Star Rating:
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Review:
Let me start with the sentence I could not shake: "I often wonder what changed me more, the experiments, or the betrayal of the people I once called family." 💔 That line does something to a person. It set the temperature for the entire novel and I never quite cooled off.
The Woman Of Fire, book one of the Eyes Of Fire series, introduces us to Victoria Stevens, and I want to talk about her for a moment because she is the reason this book works so beautifully. 🧠 Victoria is a conservator. Restoration is her love language. She sees patterns where other people see noise, she details things chronologically, and she memorizes with a precision that borders on devotional. Ahmed does something clever here. He does not hand her a sword or a superpower. He hands her a disciplined mind, and then he puts her somewhere that mind is the only thing she has left. Her ability to hold information becomes her saving grace and the single thread she clings to when everything else is stripped away.
It starts with a knock at the door. 🚪 Her parents are practically glowing. Such a wonderful opportunity, they tell her. The Prometheus Initiative. Underneath that name, in smaller print, the real description: Advanced Bio-Tech and Cognitive Research. Victoria's instincts scream at her. She ignores them, because they are her parents and she does not want to disappoint them. I read that section with my jaw tight, because so many of us understand exactly that particular flavor of obedience. 😣
What follows is not an orientation. She is swept away under tight security, then moved again like a captive being marched through unfamiliar terrain, and when the hood finally comes off she is standing inside the mountain at Groom Lake. 🏔️ Nothing about it makes sense to her, and Ahmed keeps us right there beside her in that disorientation. No one is supposed to know a facility exists inside that mountain, and Ahmed renders it with cold, clinical dread. She is sealed. She is rewritten. She is broken down into a designation, and they are genuinely convinced they can erase who she was.
They were wrong. ⚡
Here is where the journey of V21, or rather V.I.C.T.O.R.I.A., truly begins, and it is impressive work. When the final experiment tears time open and she awakens in 1400, masked and altered and feared as the woman with the eyes of fire, the novel expands rather than collapses. 🕯️ A lesser book would have lost control of that pivot. This one uses it to ask sharper questions about identity, memory, and what is actually left of a person after everyone who was supposed to protect her decided she was expendable.
The writing is atmospheric and deliberate. 📖 The suspense is psychological, built out of dread and information rather than noise. And the momentum is honestly ridiculous. I kept promising myself one more chapter, which is a promise I have never once kept in my life.
It is genuinely hard to say more without wandering into spoiler country, so I will stop myself here. But I will say this much: that ending. 😮 Priceless. Absolutely priceless. It reframes things in a way I did not see coming, and I sat with the book closed in my lap for a good while afterward.
If you enjoy science fiction with a thriller pulse, morally complicated characters, government facilities that make your skin crawl, and a heroine whose greatest weapon is her memory, this one belongs on your shelf. 🔥
I am completely here for book two. Completely. ⏳
Thank you, Malik A. Ahmed, and VoraciousReaders for the gifted copy of this book. It was a genuine pleasure and I cannot wait to see where this series goes. 🙏📚
October 5, 2026
A suspenseful sci fi thriller that hooked me from the first chapter. It was an easy read and I finished it in less than 24 hours!
I immediately warmed to Victoria (anyone so dedicated at preserving texts and books is already a hero in my eyes). Her resilience and mental strength in the face of adversity are what will stay with me most from reading this book. I could really feel for her, and I found myself actually getting anxious as they found new ways to incapacitate her.
As much as I enjoyed this, it did feel like things were just getting started. From the blurb, I expected more of Victoria's time in the 1400s, so I was surprised when it ended where it did. I'm interested to see where book two will take us.
Thank you to the author and Voracious Readers Only for the ARC and this review is my own honest opinion.
I immediately warmed to Victoria (anyone so dedicated at preserving texts and books is already a hero in my eyes). Her resilience and mental strength in the face of adversity are what will stay with me most from reading this book. I could really feel for her, and I found myself actually getting anxious as they found new ways to incapacitate her.
As much as I enjoyed this, it did feel like things were just getting started. From the blurb, I expected more of Victoria's time in the 1400s, so I was surprised when it ended where it did. I'm interested to see where book two will take us.
Thank you to the author and Voracious Readers Only for the ARC and this review is my own honest opinion.
August 11, 2026
MALIK A. AHMEDIt’s rare to find a book that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. This one did. I read it in four relentless days, unable to stop, unable to look away.
Victoria Stevens is not just a character; she is a wound. What her family did to her is brutal, quiet, and deeply unforgivable. The author doesn't explain. Doesn't justify. She simply reveals, layer by layer, until you feel every crack in Victoria's bones. That takes talent. Raw, unflinching talent.
This is not a story you forget. It's a story that stays under your skin. And now I am counting the days until the second book arrives. Until then, I bow to the author. Bravo.
Victoria Stevens is not just a character; she is a wound. What her family did to her is brutal, quiet, and deeply unforgivable. The author doesn't explain. Doesn't justify. She simply reveals, layer by layer, until you feel every crack in Victoria's bones. That takes talent. Raw, unflinching talent.
This is not a story you forget. It's a story that stays under your skin. And now I am counting the days until the second book arrives. Until then, I bow to the author. Bravo.
September 17, 2026
Wow this book grabbed me from the start and wouldn't let go. The story of Victoria, sold, horrifically experimented on and altered but unbroken is transported into the distant past. A story of resilience. I liked the writing style and the ideas were terrifying. An unusual, entertaining and accomplished first novel from his author. I look forward to reading more in this series. I received a complimentary copy from Voracious readers and am leaving a voluntary honest review.
October 6, 2026
A Haunting Story About Losing Yourself and Refusing to Disappear
I picked this up expecting a typical sci-fi thriller about secret experiments, but what I got was something much quieter and more disturbing. This book got under my skin in ways I did not anticipate.
The story follows Victoria, a young manuscript conservator who gets sold by her own parents to a shadowy biotech organization called Prometheus. The setup alone made my stomach drop. Five billion dollars. Her parents signed without hesitation. The scene where she watches the video of them smiling after signing the contract broke something in me. That moment when she realizes every childhood memory now carries a question she never thought to ask. That hit hard.
What makes this book work is the voice. Victoria is an archivist, someone who preserves other people's stories, and the author uses that beautifully. The way she retreats into her mental archive to survive the surgeries and conditioning is both heartbreaking and clever. The palimpsest metaphor, a manuscript scraped clean so someone else can write over it, runs through the whole book and never feels forced.
The horror here is not jump scares. It is the slow erosion of a person. They take her clothes. Her hair. Her voice. Her hunger. Her face. Piece by piece. The chapter where she looks in the mirror and cannot find herself anymore was genuinely difficult to read. And when they seal her mouth completely and she realizes she will never hear her own voice again, I had to put the book down for a minute.
The Silent Wing chapters were brutal in the best way. The woman in C-19 who could not speak but still found ways to communicate. The small gestures through glass. The way people disappeared and their cells were cleaned before anyone could mourn them. That stayed with me.
I will say the middle section drags a little. The training chapters with Colonel Briggs get repetitive after a while, and some of the philosophical musings about memory and archives start to circle the same ideas. I understand why they are there but the pacing could have been tighter.
The ending caught me off guard. I was not expecting time travel, and honestly I am still not sure how I feel about it. It opens up interesting possibilities but also feels like a genre shift that the first two thirds of the book did not quite prepare me for. That said, the final image of Victoria in her stitched leather mask, watching village fires from a mountainside while they begin to call her the Woman of Fire, is powerful. She has been erased from every record, transformed into something no longer fully human, and yet she refuses to vanish. She becomes a legend instead of a person. That is both a victory and a tragedy.
If you like slow burn psychological horror with a protagonist who refuses to break even when everything is taken from her, this is worth your time. Just be prepared for it to hurt.
I picked this up expecting a typical sci-fi thriller about secret experiments, but what I got was something much quieter and more disturbing. This book got under my skin in ways I did not anticipate.
The story follows Victoria, a young manuscript conservator who gets sold by her own parents to a shadowy biotech organization called Prometheus. The setup alone made my stomach drop. Five billion dollars. Her parents signed without hesitation. The scene where she watches the video of them smiling after signing the contract broke something in me. That moment when she realizes every childhood memory now carries a question she never thought to ask. That hit hard.
What makes this book work is the voice. Victoria is an archivist, someone who preserves other people's stories, and the author uses that beautifully. The way she retreats into her mental archive to survive the surgeries and conditioning is both heartbreaking and clever. The palimpsest metaphor, a manuscript scraped clean so someone else can write over it, runs through the whole book and never feels forced.
The horror here is not jump scares. It is the slow erosion of a person. They take her clothes. Her hair. Her voice. Her hunger. Her face. Piece by piece. The chapter where she looks in the mirror and cannot find herself anymore was genuinely difficult to read. And when they seal her mouth completely and she realizes she will never hear her own voice again, I had to put the book down for a minute.
The Silent Wing chapters were brutal in the best way. The woman in C-19 who could not speak but still found ways to communicate. The small gestures through glass. The way people disappeared and their cells were cleaned before anyone could mourn them. That stayed with me.
I will say the middle section drags a little. The training chapters with Colonel Briggs get repetitive after a while, and some of the philosophical musings about memory and archives start to circle the same ideas. I understand why they are there but the pacing could have been tighter.
The ending caught me off guard. I was not expecting time travel, and honestly I am still not sure how I feel about it. It opens up interesting possibilities but also feels like a genre shift that the first two thirds of the book did not quite prepare me for. That said, the final image of Victoria in her stitched leather mask, watching village fires from a mountainside while they begin to call her the Woman of Fire, is powerful. She has been erased from every record, transformed into something no longer fully human, and yet she refuses to vanish. She becomes a legend instead of a person. That is both a victory and a tragedy.
If you like slow burn psychological horror with a protagonist who refuses to break even when everything is taken from her, this is worth your time. Just be prepared for it to hurt.
September 29, 2026
The narrative followed Victoria Stevens, a conservator or archivist who repaired medieval ledgers and preserved old records, who was persuaded by their parents to participate in a fellowship. Backed by their own funds, they assumed the Prometheus Initiative was a harmless biotechnology project. After accepting the contract's terms and conditions, Stevens was unknowingly thrust into a dangerous government experiment involving alterations and modifications to the human body and the erasure and linkage of your past life.
This is a suspenseful yet eerie science fiction story of a woman who was subjected to drugs and advanced scientific procedure which succeeded in producing a prototype being that scientists could have never imagined existed.
This is a suspenseful yet eerie science fiction story of a woman who was subjected to drugs and advanced scientific procedure which succeeded in producing a prototype being that scientists could have never imagined existed.
September 21, 2026
This was both a heartbreaking and affirming start to a series. Victoria is sold by her parents to Prometheus, which takes her identity, her voice, and transforms her into something even they can’t control. Victoria’s ability to hold onto a shred of herself throughout all of this is a testament to her strength and willpower. She’s a heroine who draws you in even if sci-fi isn’t one of your go to genres, I can’t wait to see where this series goes from here.
September 26, 2026
Initially I was excited for Veronica thinking she was going to a University. Then it all became scary, lose your mind scary. The ending was totally unexpected. I'm ready for the next installment. Very well written and straight forward easy to read in one sitting. Four stars.
October 5, 2026
The text and picture come across as AI generated. That's a good thing, because if the character was real, she'd suffocate from her mask not having air holes. If you're looking for a book written by a human, I'd recommend avoiding this product.
September 27, 2026
Wow just wow. What a great read. The author writing is amazing from the very first page it just grips you. You have to read more. Thank you voracious readers and the author for giving me a copy. I just finished reading and j want to read it again.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews