A Thousand Paper Cranes

"WE DID TERRIBLE THINGS TOGETHER."

"WE DID WHAT WE HAD TO DO."

Rainier Daweson has never known how to leave someone behind.

Not River, anyway.

Her twin, her other half; the boy whose bad decisions have always somehow become debts Rain is responsible for paying.

By twenty-one, she has already learned how to disappear-into drugs, into art, into the quiet places inside her own head where the world cannot reach her.

Then River's addiction carries him somewhere she cannot follow.

Naturally, she does anyway.

When his debts become more than money, Rain takes his place and falls through the rabbit hole, into a world built on blood and silence and all the little dark things, twisting and writhing and eating.

There, a man who has made a study of what people become when they have nothing left to lose takes an interest in her. In the girl who would willingly bleed for someone else. In the strange, stubborn intelligence beneath all that selflessness.

He builds his own version of hell - and Rain is given a choice: descend, or leave her brother behind.

Somewhere along the way, there is Scott Rojas - the younger brother of the man who holds her life in his hands. He should have been a warning. Instead, he becomes the first person to make her wonder if love could be something other than sacrifice.

But there are some places where love and violence grow too close together to tell them apart.

Rain has spent her entire life believing that if she loves someone enough, she can save them.

She is about to learn that some people cannot be saved; and that sometimes, in trying to save someone else, you lose yourself first.

A Thousand Paper Cranes is a story about the people we would destroy ourselves to save, and the terrible things we do when we cannot bear to let them go.