Prologue
Violet
The hemp rope around Edward Fitzgerald’s throat was beautiful, precise, and tight enough to make him understand he was mine now as we stared at each other. He looked older than I remembered, impressively so, even while tied to a chair in the room that would become his coffin.
His split lip leaked crimson down his pepper-gray faded beard, pooling in the hollow of his throat where ebony rope pressed against his carotid. Not tight enough to kill. Just tight enough to make each swallow a conscious effort, each breath a negotiation with the fibers that would decide his fate.
A fate I held in my hands after forcing them to their knees.
Naturally, Edward didn’t recognize me. In this life, I’d never been taken. Never been sold. Never spent twenty-four years as his property, learning the precise pitch of his breathing when he was about to hurt me.
But I remembered everything from my previous life. . . the one in which he’d murdered me.
Even now, with fear thickening the air between us, I saw him as I had back then: polished, wealthy, untouchable. A British aristocrat with enough money to fold laws into origami. I remembered those green eyes—narrowed in disgust when I fought back, and glittering with malicious satisfaction when he overpowered me.
Now I held him by his balls, murky eyes wide with confusion behind the bloodied gag from where he had nearly bitten his tongue off.
“Violet.” Rowan’s voice, low and controlled, reached me from somewhere behind Edward’s chair. “The tie is almost complete.”
I stiffened, turning just enough to catch the reassuring silhouette of Rowan’s profile in the low light. Dark-clad. Broad-shouldered. Well defined and taller than he had any right to be. Rowan was a god’s sinful angel in human form—though the proprietor might disagree. In the deepening shadows, his face was partially hidden despite the sharp contrast of achromatic hair, but those eyes—those impossibly pale eyes—remained steady. This was the Rowan I’d fallen for: focused, measured, disciplined. He was neither gentle nor cruel in his methods.
I crouched in front of our guest, studying the way panic made his pupils dilate. “Good,” I said before I clenched my teeth and focused on examining the spectrum of bruises on Edward’s face. Such a small man, once he was stripped of his Savile Row armor and Swiss bank accounts. “Do you know where you are, Edward?”
He made a sound behind the silk tie gag: part denial, part plea.
“This is the Second Circle,” I said. I trailed my fingers along the ebony rope crossing his chest and felt him flinch. “The hidden domain beneath your favorite nightclub, Oubliette. This is where demons make deals and gods ignore prayers. This is where money meansnothingand blood meanseverything.”
His eyes darted around the stone chamber. The obsidian walls reflected my shadow in fractures, making me look legion. Making me look like all the girls he’d ever hurt, converging on him at once.
Behind him, Rowan finished with methodical precision, adjusting knots with the same care he used when binding me. But this wasn’t shibari. I’d learned the difference the first time Rowan had shown me how rope could be art or agony depending on intention.
“Shibari celebrates the body,”he’d explained during our first session together. I shivered as I remembered how his fingers guided mine along the patterns he’d tied across my ribs.“Every knot is designed to enhance, to display, to honor what it holds.”
Then he’d shown me theotherstyle.
“Hojojutsu was a precursor to modern-day handcuffs. The knots are designed to dig into pressure points and apply stress to joints. It was meant to break thebody. With Hojojutsu,”he whispered into my ear,“it is time that becomes the torturer.”
Edward was learning that lesson now. The taut rope pulled his shoulders back in something that looked similar to what Rowan called a box tie, only far less elegant than any knot he had ever used on me. Edward’s wrists twisted in ways that would leave nerve damage if we kept him here long enough.
I smiled, knowing we would.
Originally, I’d wanted something cruder: Edward hogtied, his ass raised and vulnerable to my spiked stiletto pressing against his hole, making him bleed and beg like he’d once made me. I’d fantasized about his tears, his desperate pleas moistening my lacey thong while I defiled him as he’d done to countless others. That image had burned in my mind.
But Rowan, my umbral knight, had said no. He’d suggested somethingsimpler. Such artistry, wasted on this swine. I hated that it wasn’t my flesh bearing those beautiful bruises and markings.
“He is secure.” Rowan’s hand settled on my shoulder, his thumb brushing my neck where my pulse hammered against my skin. Even through my fury, my body responded to him, wet with just a brief stroke. “You may take your time.”
Time. Such a strange concept when I had two lives' worth of parallel memories bouncing around in my head. Currently, I was a twenty-year-old college freshman who’d never been touched without consent. In my previous life, I was a thirty-three-year-old sex slave whom Edward strung up and bled out like a pig for the crime of aging out.
While other girls my age were studying for finals and learning how to fall in and out of love, I was sitting in lecture halls with my heart pounding like it was trying to claw its way out of my chest. I woke night after night, choking on the same nightmares, soaked in the same terror I tried so hard to pretend I’d escaped–but vengeance had threaded itself into my bones, seeped into my blood and coiled its spiteful hatred into my heart, refusing to loosen its grip.
In the daylight, I was a survivor.
In the dark, I was still trying to crawl out of the room he once locked me in, afraid and calling out to a family who would never know if I wasalive or dead. When I had demanded freedom, begged to fly past the walls, Edward had burned my fucking wings to ash.
Both versions of me wanted him dead. The only difference was methodology.
“You don’t know me,” I said as I stood and circled his chair. “But you know girlslikeme. Young ones. Pretty ones. Ones you have paid a lot of money for.”
