Ashley M Bennett

Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury. She has no time for relationships. Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.

You’ve heard of these groups–the secretive ones that only the crème de la crème are invited into, the ones outsiders speculate about for centuries–I’m the second in my family invited to attend, but to them, I’m fresh meat. New blood. New money, too. They think they’ll elbow past me, that I’m here for their amusement, for them to walk all over, they’ll find out soon enough that I’m not. I may look like one of them, with my designer bags and clothes straight from the Parisian runways, but I’m not.

There are only two rules to the game. Stay alive. And don’t fall in love. When Ophelia’s sister disappears, there is only one way to save her. Ophelia must enter Phantasma, a deadly contest inside a haunted mansion, and claim its prize—a single wish. Phantasma is a maze of twisting corridors and lavish ballrooms, of demons and temptations. Ophelia will face nine challenges, each more dangerous than the last. There can only be one winner, and the other contestants will stop at nothing to eliminate their rivals.