Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 132491 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132491 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Briar Hollis would rather die fighting than live kneeling—and New America's brutal regime is about to grant her wish. Condemned for refusing to breed the next generation of their twisted society, she's given an execution or exile to Blue Arrow Island, where survival is measured in heartbeats and mercy is a luxury no one can afford.
The island doesn't just break prisoners—it devours them.
Blue Arrow isn't just a prison; it's a savage paradise where predators lurk and the laws of science don’t apply. Here, mercenaries rule through blood and brutality, and every shadow hides a new threat. But Briar didn't come here to surrender.
Then she meets him.
Dark, lethal, and infuriatingly magnetic, he commands the island's most feared faction with an iron fist and secrets that could either save her life or end it. Their chemistry is a live wire—explosive, consuming, and absolutely forbidden. He's everything she should avoid, yet she finds herself drawn to the dangerous game they're playing, where one wrong move could mean death... or something far more dangerous.
Love.
As the island's mysteries unravel and prisoners lose their grip on sanity, Briar discovers she holds the key to destroying the twisted new world order. But it will require her to trust the one man who could betray her, navigate deadly alliances, and survive a power struggle that will test every limit she thought she had.
In a world where trust is a death sentence and love is the ultimate rebellion, how far will she go to burn it all down?
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
PART ONE
1
There’s a cost to what I do. It’s too heavy at times. But I’ve brought that cost on others, so I suppose the least I can do is bear it, even if it eventually crushes me.
Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Randall McClain
I’m alive. At least, I think so. Surely the afterlife doesn’t smell like diesel fumes and salt water. It’s been a long time since I breathed in anything but the musty decay of a prison cell.
I shift and raise my fingertips to my cracked lips, a bolt of pain zinging through one of my shoulders. When I open my eyes, overpowering light makes me squeeze them shut again. I’ve been in the dark for weeks; my eyes can’t handle the brightness.
Something nudges my leg. I ignore it, gently running my fingers over my wrists. I’m not tied up anymore. The welts left behind by the binds ache, but it’s nothing compared to my raging headache.
“Wake up,” someone whispers urgently, nudging my leg again.
I squint against the sunlight that floods my eyes, getting into a sitting position. A gust of thick, humid air blasts my ripe, unwashed scent straight into my nostrils.
I’m on the dingy white fiberglass deck of a boat, one of about two dozen people. Some of them are still sleeping.
No, not sleeping. The last thing I remember is guzzling the jug of water guards brought to my cell. My painful, swollen lips and intense thirst tell me I haven’t had water in a long time, and I’m groggy. I was unconscious. And the other people lying on the deck are too.
“We’re here,” the person who nudged me whispers.
I turn to look at the woman sitting next to me, my eyes starting to adjust. Her black, shoulder-length hair has dried blood crusted in it and I can feel the dread in her golden-brown eyes. She glances down at my wrists, and I assume she’s looking at my rope burns.
Then I see them in clear light for the first time—the thick black X tattoos that stretch from knuckles to wrist on the backs of both of my hands. It’s been several weeks since I was branded with the marks, but I couldn’t see them in the darkness. It’s like I’m looking at someone else’s hands, the skin familiar but the ink foreign.
She holds out her wrist, bearing the same tattoo. “I’m Amira.”
“Briar.”
“They’re taking us to an island.”
I fight to swallow against the dryness in my throat. I had no choice really, between exile and death for my so-called crime, but I thought exile meant a remote prison where I could plan an escape. How the hell will I escape from an island?
“Get up!” a deep male voice booms. “You shit sacks are jumping off this rig in about two minutes. Stand up so we can get a good look at you.”
I count the guards, all men wearing dark uniforms with the New America flag emblazoned on a large patch on the shoulder. The flag’s stripes are vertical now, the resemblance to a cell a fitting metaphor. The guards are a motley mixture of big and small, shaven and unshaven, fastidious and disheveled, because there are only two qualifications to serve in President Soren Whitman’s rapidly growing empire: be male and believe in Whitman’s brutal reshaping of society to serve his twisted biblical agenda.
There are eight of them, all strapped with multiple weapons. One of them, a bulky man with his finger casually resting on the hilt of a dagger sheathed at his waist, studies several of us and calls out, “I’ll do a hundred credits on the biter.”
I force myself to look down and appear demure, though it’s a little late for that. He’s talking about me—I bit the thumb of one of the guards so hard he had to get it stitched up. He was trying to carry a girl out of our cell, and there’s only one reason guards come alone to cells late at night.
I’m sure that same guard, or maybe a different one, got that girl another time. But not that night. That night, she was safe.
“Fifty on that little Hispanic one,” another guard says, leering at Amira.
“I’m fucking Egyptian,” she says under her breath.
“Don’t,” I caution her.
Whitman’s soldiers take extra glee in being cruel to women, and we can’t give them a reason to quietly cut our throats out here, where no one will ever know.
While one guard finishes taking bets, another walks around, kicking the people still lying motionless. Two of them groan and move. Six don’t. He kicks them again, pulling his foot back farther this time to inflict more pain.
“Six dead,” he says flatly. “You want us to throw them over?”
Why are six prisoners dead? What the hell did they do to us?
“Yeah, I’m not burying those fucks,” another guard says. “Toss ‘em.”