They thought they had captured a rich old man. They were wrong.
In the shadowy, frozen outskirts of St. Petersburg, Lucian Farest lives in isolated opulence. An enigma wrapped in wealth, he glides through the city in his Bentley, a ghost with no past and seemingly no protection. To the brutal Voronin crime family, he is the perfect target-a simple kidnapping for an easy ransom.
Their mistake will be their last.
When the mob's arrogant young heir snatches Farest, they drag him to a fortified stronghold, expecting fear and compliance. Instead, Farest sits calmly in his chains and delivers an ultimatum of his own: "Pay me eight billion rubles...or forfeit your eternal souls."
They laugh. They tell him to go to hell.
And that is precisely when the fun begins.
Now, locked in their own impregnable fortress with their captive, the Voronins are about to learn a terrifying truth: they didn't kidnap a man. They kidnapped a predator. As family members begin to turn up-or parts of them-in increasingly grotesque and inexplicable ways, the survivors face a desperate choice. Do they fight the monster in their midst, or do they pay the price he demands?
With the local police baffled by the carnage and forced to seek help from the very criminals they hunt, a chilling question emerges: How do you stop a devil who has already taken you?
A chilling novel of supernatural terror from the author of Never Whistle in The House.
Jerrimiah Stonecastle masterfully blends the gritty realism of the Russian underworld with the heart-stopping dread of an ancient evil in this relentless, blood-soaked thriller
