Rose was no stranger to the wrath and punishment of God. It had been pumped into her brain from the moment she’d been born. Both she and her older sister, Lily, worked their fingers to the bone trying to obtain the perfection required to live in the Pastor’s home. Their silent and weak mother, Ethel, another subject of the Pastor’s wrath, stood by and watched as he constantly ridiculed his daughters for their weaknesses.

The punishments for broken rules were severe. He used to say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” A mockery of sorts, it amplified the pain, as if Pastor were suffering as he dealt out wrath according to the laws of raising a child in perfect righteousness.

The only relief Rose found was in Lily. They secretly whispered to each other of the day when they would escape the house to see the world in all of its wonder.

But they never escaped together, because Lily had become sick with pneumonia and died.

Actually, it wasn’t the pneumonia that had killed Lily; it was the vile threats of Pastor, who demanded she repent of whatever sin had caused the illness. He wasn’t about to be seen as a leader whose own children failed to attain the holiness required of them.

Or maybe it was the pneumonia, but Rose blamed her father for robbing Lily of the will to fight the disease.

Rose was sixteen, and the only light in her dark world had been extinguished. She’d tried to kill herself with a rusty nail that night.

Sylous had come to her for the first time then. Whispered to her about how he could protect her, save her, and set her on a different path. A chosen path on which she would be safe from all the cruel people who lived in sin.

All she had to do was agree. Would she?

She had. And as his first show of power, Sylous had killed her father in his home office as Rose looked on. He showed Pastor monsters terrifying enough to send him into cardiac arrest.

It was the first time Rose had seen a Fury—the true wrath of God, not the manipulated version Pastor used to justify his violence.

Her mother mourned the loss of her husband, oblivious to how the heart attack had occurred. Despite her compassion for her mother, Rose couldn’t stomach another day in the house with a woman who still treasured the monster she’d married. So she left with Sylous.

In the wake of such oppression, living homeless proved to be a blessing. For several years Sylous guided her as she blossomed into a young woman with strong character and beauty that turned heads. Sylous appeared and vanished at will, but whenever she needed him, he was there.