“You see, there is safety in simplicity… in a life of simple peace, where the electricity doesn’t dance across the backs of my eyelids, and the sparks don’t slither over my consciousness. Only asinine peace, where my paintings don’t seem to paint themselves, leaving me with terrible feelings of premonition and a chill beneath my fingernails.”
Seraph Black used to think that she was prepared for anything. She could last days without eating and she always walked away from the violent altercations with her father relatively unharmed. She survived working at the club and the drive to school every day in her mother’s rust-bucket of a car… but it all changed when Noah and Cabe came bulldozing into her life, careless of the precious secrets they picked apart in their quest to take over her world. She was even less prepared for the mysterious Miro and Silas, and nothing could have prepared her for the bond. The connection. The reason for it all.
Someone wanted her to stay away from her new friends, but she wasn’t willing to do that.
Everyone had secrets.
She wanted to know theirs. They wanted to own hers.
And the stalker?
He seemed to know everything already.
“Maybe I was stupid to have agreed to this, but when all of the options that you have in life are dangerous ones, you can only choose to do something reckless, or turn a blind eye and allow the cards to fall as they may… and I was sick of being blind.”
Seraph Black has endured a vicious stalker, a change of schools, a bonding, a triple-murder, and more than her fair share of uncomfortable situations; but it seems like the world isn’t done with her yet. The messenger is back with a systematic vengeance that knocks her flat, and not even her self-proclaimed secret-keepers are prepared for how far he is willing to go to get what he wants.
She is walking on eggshells, trying to keep everyone at a distance. Especially those that are closest to her. Unfortunately, there is one person who keeps slipping through the cracks: Silas Quillan, the gift in her life that keeps on taking. Every time she turns around, he’s taking something else from her: her choices, her privacy, her freedom, her sanity… and if she’s not careful, the the next victim might just be her heart.
“The paint dripped off me like a liquid coat and I inhaled the toxic fumes, sucking the undiluted scent into my lungs. My pupils dilated as I sank into the vision of a pain so absolute, it went beyond pain. It should have rendered me unconscious, it should have affected my ability, it felt like it should have killed me. As it was, the pain distracted me so badly that I was unable to focus on any other details. I painted turquoise wounds that wept turquoise blood onto the paper floor, and when I was finished, I painted more. I painted the walls, the floor, the back of the door and the boarded-up windows. I covered the room in wounds and fumes, and then I curled up in the middle of the mess, weeping my heart into my paint-covered hands.”
The past few months have reduced Seraph Black to a permanent state of fight, and now it is all that she knows. She is fighting her friends and family to go off on a suicide mission to rescue Silas, she is fighting the fragmented memories that clamour for recognition inside her mind, and she is fighting a guilt so magnificent… it might just force her to betray the very people that have sacrificed so much to keep her safe.
She had asked for space, and it had been given to her in the most heart-rending of ways, leaving only one of the four brothers remaining by her side.
Miro Quillan is her last hope.
Without him, she may never get her pairs back.
“I had to understand that grief would be a constant in my life, and that it would be different every time it returned to me: the same face hidden beneath a brand new hat. I needed to say goodbye to this chapter of my life, to the grief that had clawed at me, to the threat that had stalked me through the shadows …”
Seraph Black’s entire world has changed. There are no more secrets in her life, but knowledge comes at a price. Memories take their toll. Reality demands a due.
The silent shadow of her past has stepped into the light and revealed himself. He has lost everything, and the only thing left for him to do is to make sure that she loses everything as well.
Survival is a complicated game, but her pairs are determined to become experts at it before they run out of time. If only they knew about the brand of pain in her portraits that was never there before, because something is seriously wrong.
Her visions are changing.
People are dying.
The world is turning on its head once again.