Fated Rebirth (Heretical Gods #1)

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 means nothing and blood means everything.”

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 the other style.

“Hojōjutsu 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 the body. With Hojōjutsu,” 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 something simpler. 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 was alive 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 girls like me. Young ones. Pretty ones. Ones you have paid a lot of money for.”

His breathing quickened. Good. Let him wonder how I know.

“How many did you buy this year, Edward? Three? Four?” I stopped behind him, leaning down close enough that my breath stirred the top of his pepper-gray hair.

“I know about the auction houses. The private sales. The discrete shipping containers with air holes.” After all, I had been with him many times to watch as they unloaded from his private dock.

While I had been a simple exchange due to my young age, I knew others were not as fortunate.

“You’ve been a very bad man, Edward.” I stroked his hair gently.

He jerked against the ropes, accomplishing nothing except tightening the knots that were designed to constrict with struggle.

“Edward.” I tsked. “The more you fight, the deeper the hemp will bite. You should know this, though it was never your preferred method of inflicting pain.” I moved my hand down to pat his shoulder comfortingly, resisting the urge to sink my nails into his flesh.

“Violet.” Rowan’s warning came soft, but I heard the edge beneath it. He knew how close I walked to the edge of my control. His earlier words of wisdom echoed in my mind, “Revenge without patience is just bloodlust. And bloodlust never satisfies.”

“Yeah, I know.” I sighed and moved back into Edward’s line of sight and lifted a knife from the table stationed in front of him. His eyes tracked the blade when it came into view: six inches of Damascus steel that could fillet a fish or a pharynx with equal efficiency.

“In another life,” I said, testing the edge against my thumb, “You bought me when I was nine and kept me in captivity for twenty-four years. Do you know what that does to a person?” With the lightest press, the knife drew a thin line of my own blood.

Edward squirmed, making inarticulate choking sounds.

“It teaches you patience. Observation. How to read every micro-expression on your owner’s face.

” I smiled as his eyes widened at what he saw, caught off guard by my lack of response to the cut.

“It also taught me quite a lot about you. I know you’re allergic to shellfish.

I know you sleep on your left side. I know you cry out your ex-wife’s name when you come. ” That last part made him go rigid.

“Catherine is a lovely name,” I said wistfully.

Tears began to streak his face. His cries pulled out ugly memories of how he used to sob her name while raping me more times than I could count. Apparently, even monsters had people they missed.

“But most importantly,” I continued, moving closer, “I know you’ve already bought other girls in this life. Just because I wasn’t one of them doesn’t mean they don’t deserve justice.”

Rowan stepped into my peripheral, a statuesque form clad in black and my body responded without thought.

My hip canted towards him, shoulders dropping from their defensive position.

Even while facing my owner and serial rapist, even while discussing the worst trauma of my existence, Rowan made me feel safe enough to want. He had given me back my wings.

“Show him,” Rowan suggested, his voice carrying his calm and confident tone that made my thighs clench. “Show him what awaits him.”

I set the knife on the stone altar that served as a table. Next to it lay other tools: specialized instruments for organ removal and containment, should I decide to sell them for a little profit.