Kidnapped, beaten half-dead and delusional with fever, Meredith Banks awakes as a captive in a hellish compound somewhere in the desolate backcountry of the American southwest. Ever since she set off in pursuit of her son’s kidnapper, the obsessive psychopath Christian Morgan, Meredith’s ordinary life as a single mom has been swallowed whole by an endless, surreal nightmare.
Turns out, finding her son was the easy part. It’s getting him to safety that’s the trouble. Now, her only hope of surviving, much less escaping with her son, is to bide her time and try to integrate into Christian’s cult of brainwashed, kidnapped girls—but for that, she has to resist the brainwashing herself, and that’s no easy task. For Christian is impossibly beautiful, charming as the Devil and twice as cunning. Meredith’s greatest trial yet may be resisting the compulsion of her abductor’s hypnotic smile. Her son, her sanity, and her soul depend on it.