Delaware_Mom

Pain is an abyss. How naive of me to think I’d already reached the very depths of it when fate shook my world with a crushing blow. It turns out there are fathomless levels of pain, like a winding labyrinth of doors leading to shadowy figures and long-forgotten secrets. The kind of inescapable descent into madness that twists nightmares into reality. What lies at the end of this obscure path I have yet to discover. But where it begins is a place called Infernium: an asylum feared by those in Nightshade and untrodden by the angels who’ve forsaken its many lost souls.

My father called them messengers. He once told me they walked among us and that somewhere in this dark and godless city, there shined a faint sliver of hope. I had only to look for the signs. Well, I’ve spent my whole life investigating the inexplicable and all I've found are the unsettling vestiges of iniquity—the evidence of another world shrouded by the obscure. Purgatory to some, where depravity hides in shadows, and girls like me are little more than delicious bites of temptation. Others call it Nightshade.

My father had just sold me off. Bartered my body to erase his debt to the very devil himself. A Beast of a man. Literally. A creature whispered about amongst the villagers and feared by all. He was a beastly visage at three times the size of a man, his monstrously huge body covered in fur. Sharp fangs and eyes that held an unearthly red glow. He had paw-like hands tipped with claws and horns that arched back from his inhuman face. I was to live with him, to be his in every way—all ways—he saw fit.

Katelyn Locke sets sail to America, her heart singing about her new life to be as a bride. She beholds America's virgin shores with wonder until her cowardly fiance abandons her in the forest when they are attacked by Indians. In the first moments she faces her captor in terror. The warrior Night Fox reaches out and touches her cheek. What fool would leave a treasure like this behind? He is bewitched by his tribe's newest captive. Her lustrous hair is red like the fox's, her silky skin reminds him of the yellow wildflower.

Known as a harbinger of bad omens and blamed for Demons eating her family, Reia is shunned by her entire village. When the next offering is due and the monstrous Duskwalker is seen heading their way, her village offers her an impossible choice—be thrown into the prison cells or allow herself to be sacrificed to a faceless monster.