The Serpent Compass: An Archaelogical Adventure Romance. The Meridian Arc Trilogy, #2

Dr. Elena Marquez thought the lost city of Paititi had given her the truth. It only opened the next door. After surviving the jungle and exposing the first piece of the Meridian conspiracy, Elena follows a dangerous trail to Cairo, where her vanished father's clues point toward an ancient device known as the Serpent Compass. It is rumored to be an artifact. A map. A key. It is something far more dangerous.
Gabriel Cross is still at Elena's side, no longer just the man she should not trust, but the one person who understands how deep the Meridian Trust's reach truly goes. Their alliance has become something sharper, riskier, and harder to deny, even as every enemy they face learns exactly how to use love, loyalty, and family against them. From Cairo's hidden archives to a desert observatory beneath the stars, from a storm-buried lodge to a secret chamber under the Red Sea, Elena and Gabe race to find the Serpent Compass before the Trust can turn it into a weapon.
Because the Compass does not point to treasure. It points to warning. For generations, powerful people have hunted Meridian artifacts not to preserve history, but to control who receives the knowledge hidden inside them. Disaster, survival, evacuation, water, weather, famine, collapse. The Meridian system was built to protect civilizations. The Trust wants to privatize it. When Elena discovers that her father may still be alive and held by the very people chasing the Compass, the mission becomes personal in a way no scholar, operative, or daughter could survive unchanged.
To save him, expose the conspiracy, and keep the Compass from falling into private hands, Elena and Gabe must decide what truth is worth risking, and what love is worth becoming visible for. But every revelation points farther north. And somewhere beyond the Red Sea, beneath ice and memory, the final Meridian secret is beginning to wake. The Serpent Compass is a cinematic archaeological adventure romance filled with ancient mechanisms, desert pursuit, Red Sea danger, secret societies, slow-burn romantic tension, and a conspiracy that turns history itself into a weapon.