Ashes Still Burn

Everyone already knows who Rhys is. Or at least, they think they do. A foster kid. A delinquent. A monster. By seventeen, Rhys has learned that once the world decides what you are, the truth rarely matters. Violence becomes easier than vulnerability, and surviving each day is the only future he's willing to believe in. Then he meets Peyton Phillips.

Quiet, compassionate, and unafraid to look beyond the stories everyone else accepts, Peyton sees the person beneath Rhys's reputation. Peyton sees past the wolf everyone else fears. Their unlikely friendship becomes the first place either of them has ever truly belonged... until one terrible night changes everything.

Now imprisoned for murders he insists he didn't commit, Rhys recounts the months that led to his arrest, searching for the moment his life stopped being his own.
Because the deeper he digs into the past...the more impossible it becomes to believe it was ever written by chance.

Ashes Still Burn is a gripping coming-of-age psychological thriller with supernatural undercurrents, exploring first love, inherited violence, and the devastating cost of allowing others to decide who deserves to be believed. They already decided who the monster was. Rhys never got to tell his side.