When Serina had stood up to him and refused to fight another woman, when she’d invited him as her adversary instead, she’d assumed she would die.īut Slash and the Hotel Misery crew had attacked the guards Oracle and Ember had attacked Commander Ricci and Serina, unlike so many others, had somehow lived to see the morning.Įvery painful breath was a gift, one given by Oracle and Slash and all the women who’d chosen to fight the guards instead of one another. He’d captured her and put her onstage, and told her to choose which woman she would fight.

Banishment, attacks, and then, last night, Commander Ricci’s revenge. And she’d paid for that decision with pain as well. She’d submitted rather than kill Anika, a girl from Hotel Misery. When it had been Serina’s time to fight, she’d found she couldn’t do it. And then there was the agony of the fights themselves, watching women kill each other for rations. The pain of being stripped down and inspected by Commander Ricci. The pain of the shackles, of her fellow prisoners’ sobs. Since the first moment she’d stepped on this island, condemned for reading-her sister’s crime, not her own-she’d been surrounded by it. She should have known that here on Mount Ruin, survival would mean pain. In truth, finding a place where her hurts didn’t lick at her, hungry and hot, was a difficult job.īut it was the memory of Jacana’s small lifeless body, Oracle’s sightless eyes, the rows upon rows of brave dead women that caused her the most agony. The half-healed slash on her arm burned, the bullet wound in her shoulder ached, and her bruises from Commander Ricci’s punishing fists screamed. WITH EVERY BREATH, Serina Tessaro’s broken rib flamed.

Queen of ruin by tracy banghart