Unraveling Faith

She escaped the compound. She didn't escape the need to obey.Mercy has never made a choice. Raised from birth inside a fundamentalist cult, she was trained to kneel, to submit, to worship without question. When authorities raid the compound, her estranged family pulls her out—and hires the most expensive psychological deprogrammer in the country to fix what twenty-three years of indoctrination broke.Vane doesn't fix people. He rebuilds them.Cold. Brilliant. Clinically precise. He sees Mercy not as a patient to be healed, but as a mind to be rewritten. Her desperate need for authority, her craving for structure, her inability to survive without someone telling her who to be—these aren't symptoms he intends to cure. They're tools he intends to use.Behind locked doors in a sterile mountain facility, he dismantles her old god piece by piece. He strips away the guilt. The shame. The fear. He replaces every prayer with his voice, every punishment with his praise, every act of worship with his name on her lips.She doesn't realize she's trading one cage for another. She doesn't realize his therapy is a blueprint, his kindness is a protocol, and every "e;good girl"e; is a dose calibrated to the milligram.By the time she finds his notes—clinical, methodical, damning—she is already his masterpiece.But masterpieces don't stay on the wall forever. And a woman built for devotion can learn to worship something far more dangerous than a man:Herself.