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7 April 2026
Phases, by Brandy | Free Audiobook
8 April 2026
Audiobook details
The reckoning she couldn't outrun
Tierney Callaghan knows exactly what Achilles Ferrante is capable of. She's seen it up close, and she spent years putting distance between herself and the consequences of what she did to him. Twice she betrayed him. The second time, she was certain she'd bought herself enough room to disappear for good.
She was wrong. Achilles is the heir to one of the most feared criminal dynasties, and he didn't survive long enough to inherit it by letting things go. He's been patient, and now that he has her back in his sights, the bullet she always knew had her name on it has finally found a direction.
What follows isn't a chase. It's a reckoning between two people who once knew each other well enough to be dangerous, forced back into a proximity that neither of them can afford. Twisted Pawn is the second installment in L.J. Shen's Society of Villains series, a dark romance set in the world of organized crime where betrayal carries a price, and the history between two people is always harder to kill than either of them planned.
I'd already listened to Bad Bishop before this one, so the setup wasn't entirely new to me. What I didn't expect was how much harder Twisted Pawn would push on the dynamic between Tierney and Achilles. By the time the first act was done, I'd stopped thinking of it as a romance.
The structure here is four narrators handling four distinct voices: Tierney, Achilles, and two secondary characters who carry real weight in the story. L.J. Shen built this series around a criminal world where every relationship has a debt attached to it, and Twisted Pawn makes that accounting feel personal. Tierney's betrayals aren't abstract backstory anymore. You get them in detail, and the way Achilles processes them says more about him than any description of his violence would have.
What struck me most is how little the book relies on the enemies-to-lovers formula as a crutch. The hostility between these two characters is rooted in specific things that actually happened between them, not just chemistry dressed up as conflict. There's a scene in the second half where the power balance shifts so suddenly that I rewound it twice. I hadn't missed anything. Shen just moved fast.
The secondary characters matter more than they usually do in dark romance. The Society of Villains series is clearly building toward something larger, and Twisted Pawn plants threads that made me want the next book before I'd finished this one. Whether that's a compliment depends on your tolerance for serialized tension, but for me it landed well.
On the narration: the four-voice cast works better than I expected. Corvin King gives Achilles a cold, deliberate quality that fits the character, and Lila Winters handles Tierney with enough edge to keep her from tipping into passivity. At 14 hours and 46 minutes, there's room to breathe, and the production uses that space instead of rushing the quieter moments between the two leads.
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Twisted Pawn by L.J. Shen is the second installment in the Society of Villains series, and it picks up exactly where the tension left off. Tierney Callaghan has run out of places to hide from Achilles Ferrante, an assassin and Mafia heir who has been waiting a long time to collect what she owes him. The story runs on sharp edges and complicated history, and the four-voice format makes the friction between its two leads feel immediate from the first chapter.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, and listen to Corvin King, Lila Winters, Lucy Rivers, and Stephen Dexter bring this four-voice cast to life across 14 hours and 46 minutes. Each narrator handles a distinct character, and the way they trade off gives the dual perspective a tension that carries through the full runtime.
The audiobook is yours to keep even after the trial ends. The free trial also gives you access to thousands of other titles across every genre, with no commitment required. Don't wait on this one.
US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
