Showing results by author "Jane Washington" in All Categories

Isobel knows it. The Alphas know it. Yet every time they make a move, Ironside counters with two, always one step ahead, outsmarting them at every turn. Just when they grasp a lifeline, Ironside threatens to hang them with it. They have only one choice: play the game—the real game, exactly as it was designed. With new contracts pulling them deeper into the service of the Stone Dahlia and yet another settlement tour looming on the horizon, they must execute their roles flawlessly.

Ironside is more than a regular academy. It’s also the biggest reality TV show in the world … and a very elaborate, very luxurious prison. Their hallowed halls are ruled by the Betas, Omegas, and Deltas—but this year, the officials are stirring things up. Isobel Carter—the only rare Sigma to be accepted—is the first sign. But there are others. Many others. A sudden influx of powerful Alphas will turn academy life, and Isobel’s life, upside down.

The Ironside Show is back. Bigger than ever, and shinier, too. To the audience, it’s a glorious spectacle, but to Isobel Carter and the Alphas of Dorm A, it’s a trap. A maze. The further they venture, the darker their path becomes, until all the tarnish has flaked away and only the bare metal bars remain.

Isobel Carter is making headlines. Some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them … astounding. She started at the bottom and now she’s near the top with everything she never wanted, but the Ironside Show doesn’t care, because she’s just become one of the most interesting students at the academy, and everyone seems to have big plans for her.

I was born with a curse that spun a violent storm around me, seizing every beautiful and fragile thing that flittered into my life, tearing it all from my grasp as effortlessly as the wings of a butterfly are torn from its body. Or so I thought, anyway. It all changed when they came for me, when they dragged me to trial for my crimes. I should have faced execution, but fate is a fickle and funny thing, taunting me with the knowledge that I was always destined to be so much more.

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.

I had been torn apart and remade, a marionette to dance over the coals of this world, stitched together by my tormentors. The great masters thought they could break me down and own me. They were wrong. I had won my freedom, my place in this world, my golden-eyed protector by my side. Until it happened again; the grim call of fate looking out at me through eyes of darkness, the great masters waiting with the power I needed, curses and promises in their hands. It was time to make another deal. It was time to play their game in earnest.

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.

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.

Some people exist in the blessed light of day, but I'm not one of those people. I exist in the bleak grey of a post-twilight world, where the warmth is sucked from the air and the weightless shadows come out to play. I wasn’t always like this, but a year ago something terrible happened, and now I have a darkness inside me.

What began as a war of force had turned to one of secrets and strategies. An army was amassing in the shadows, hidden from our eyes, slipping into our ranks until there was nowhere safe to turn, and nobody left to trust. To win the war, I would be forced to forget the man I trusted, and to bind myself to the men I hated. Forever. Since the first day, the great masters have fought for control over me, fought to claim me in marriage and seize my power for themselves. Every step of the way, they’ve asked me to choose.

To prove the purity of my soul, I sacrificed everything. I lost my magic, my best friend, and tied myself to the five kings of the afterworld in unholy matrimony. Now, every day is torture at their hands. I am their final hope, a perfect weapon to wield in the ultimate war still looming ahead of us. They will push me as far as it takes, no matter what.

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.