Torturedpast Stories

In 2294, Cascade Andronica is attending the requisite final year of school in the once-so-vaunted Americas, now united under the governing hand of the Coalition. She plays the obedient daughter, keeping her assassin training secret, keeping her best friend safe, and fantasizing in secret about Lunar Davith Adurian, the scarred, smirky guy who's always nearby, pausing in a space of heat behind her, his breath near her hair while dusky blushes grace her skin. Then the mutation comes. It leaves them writhing on the classroom floor, no breath, no scream... until feathers of vivid hues unfold from their shoulders and whisper over their skin. Cascade staggers up along with the other students, dazed and disoriented, but then their professor's wings swarm with spiders and- She leaves him dead on the sun-drenched floor. Now on the run with Lunar, she needs to keep it together to wage an underground war against the Coalition, but inside, she's coming apart. Her father wants her to abandon her best friend. Lunar challenges her every step and antagonizes the rebellion she's supposed to control. She starts making mistakes as she struggles to hold everything in place: to hold her course, her beliefs, to hold herself- To hold anything at all when her hands are slippery with blood.

lalalalalalala ~♪ This is a story of a 17 year old boy, Beloved by many, smart, funny and popular too. His name is Hachisaki Kyuren, He is a Clown. Though by his cheerful attitude - He is hiding a whole lot of scars. His "lies" are best in town, He wont leave you with a frown.

Some men leave prison and never look back. Jessie "Luka" Brennan left, but the past isn't done with him. Five years inside taught Luka how to read a room before it reads him. Now he runs a rec-center program for kids headed the same direction he was, keeps his head down, and tries to believe redemption is something you become-not just a story you tell yourself. Invisible is safe. Invisible doesn't last. When a serial killer calling himself the Riddler starts leaving elaborate, literary puzzles at crime scenes across North Carolina, the police can't crack them. The language is too personal, built from a world the department doesn't have access to. Luka does. Because the riddles aren't just clues. They're addressed to him. Forced into an uneasy partnership with Detective Maggie Voss, Luka finds himself doing the one thing prison never let him imagine: standing on the right side of a case. But every riddle strips back another layer of the man he used to be, and it becomes clear the killer isn't a stranger studying him from a distance-he's someone who knew exactly who Luka was, and refuses to believe that man is gone. As the bodies climb and the riddles turn from taunts into threats against the people Luka has let back into his life, he'll have to answer the question the killer is betting he can't: whether redemption is real, or just the best lie he's ever told. The Riddler knows Luka's darkest secrets. He's betting Luka hasn't changed. He's wrong-but proving it will cost everything. A gripping, character-driven thriller for fans of Karin Slaughter and Chris Carter. The first book in the Jessie "Luka" Brennan series.