Killing the gray-eyed, dark haired boy across the street in her minuscule town was closure to Lacey Strauss that evening, even when she'd never killed anything in her life, even when her past was just a broken record of leaving, leaving, and left, even when the whole world seemed dead set on working against her. And it would've been achieved if her victim hadn't been Asher Malloy: an avid smoker and commissioned killer at seventeen, working for the regional drug lord alongside his amiable alcoholic of an older brother, Alex. Because when Asher turns the situation around and takes Lacey captive for five months, closure's a long time coming -- if she doesn't die first. SMOLDER tells of an intense and unlikely relationship between Lacey Strauss, an unstable teenager with violence in her blood, and Asher Malloy, a smoking, knife-throwing, incredibly cold and temperamental killer. But as tensions swell and fade between the two, anywhere from lethal hatred to headstrong intimacy, suddenly Asher finds himself valuing the very girl who tried to kill him while Lacey starts realizing the value of human life the more she must take it.

"I saw that little electricity in them that the camera gave out. She was darkness, she did not become darkness and she did not embrace darkness. She is darkness. She was always darkness and I fell in love with her, I fell in love with her darkness."

Casey Stratford and Ryder Cavanaugh are not friends. They're barely even acquaintances. But when Casey gets dumped and she's resigned herself to do everything in her power to get her ex back, even becoming an overnight daredevil, there's only one person who can help. Ryder Cavanaugh. Ryder Cavanaugh is spontaneous, reckless and irresponsible; he's everything she's not, but wants to be. So they make a deal. A deal that maybe, just maybe, has a chance of turning Casey into the town's newest daredevil. Or maybe, it'll just come back and bite her in the ass. Cover made by: @BeyondCreative