Unhinged (Echelon #9)

Sophia Ysabel Almeda arrives in Madanunan expecting a career breakthrough, not a collision with a man who will dismantle her carefully curated life. Sent by her brother Alex to handle the marketing launch of the trillion-peso Madanunan Crown resort, Sophia thrives in chaos, beauty, and spectacle. She plans to turn the mountain into a global phenomenon, not realizing someone else is quietly shaping the mountain’s future from the shadows.

Christoph Richter, Ardent Lex Group’s cold, precise lead counsel, arrives in Ilocos to finalize multinational deals and keep the empire legally unshakeable. He is disciplined, unreadable, and entirely uninterested in being distracted, until Sophia storms into his orbit with glitter, ambition, and an energy he cannot quantify.

Their worlds crash, first at the resort, then at Elysium’s opening night, and again when Sophia is forced to bring her entire marketing blueprint to Christoph’s suite for approval. What begins as irritation becomes tension, what becomes tension turns volatile, and what turns volatile becomes impossible to ignore.

As Madanunan rises, Nobu negotiations, Tsukikage expansion, international press flooding in, Sophia and Christoph are pulled into each other’s gravity. Chaotic charm meets cold precision, and neither escapes unchanged.

In a mountain built on power, spectacle, and secrets, Unhinged becomes the story of two people who never should have collided, yet can’t stop crashing into each other.