Where do you begin a story that would take years to share? Do you start on the day they held you under the water until you thought you’d drown? What about the bitterly cold night when as a young child they made you kill a stranger? How about the time you were bleeding out after being shot and stabbed watching Death come to harvest your furious soul? Why not share what it feels like to tell your beautiful wife your past was a lie and the truth is filled with secrets of the darkest kinds; that waiting behind the cracked lid of reality is horrors, madness, and murder?

I could tell you stories that would freeze the blood in your veins turning them into petrified rivers of shock, terror, and disbelief. The kind of memories that squeeze the air from your lungs and leave you breathless desperate to dismiss them as crazy fantasy. I don’t think this book is for those stories. No, those stories will be whispered in the quiet to those who need to know so that they too can be set free. Freed from whatever it is they were made to do or was done unto them. Those wounded ones, those survivors of atrocities so horrible most scream and wail desperately denying they even exist. Denial can only keep you comfortable for so long. Soon the day will come when the houses of ignorance we’ve built our lives upon will come crumbling down.

I assure you of this: there is such a thing as radical, intelligent evil, and I was bred and born firmly into its clutches. But I was not made for those shackles of slavery; nor were those irons made to keep my soul from ever becoming free. As it’s been written, “You will know The Truth and The Truth will set you free.” Through many love-filled but tear-stained experiences I have come to know The Truth, and it is because of The Truth I write you these words as a free man. I write these words with free choice burning a path of hope, which is turning the darkness of my past into the redemptive story of Good redeeming Evil. A story of Light piercing the maddening darkness and revealing to the world that hope is waiting for all those souls held in prisons of destruction, despair, and death.

We could start this true tale with the introduction, the acknowledgements, and Chapter One, but I think instead, it’s best if we start much later. We will begin where I hoped it would have ended but the “boy meets girl and they lived happily ever after” was never meant to be. Our story begins when in walked my safe harbor. The woman who held me tight while Pierced Hands of Hope ripped me out of The Underworld of Secrets and murder. It was a world, which sought with reckless abandon to drag me back into its poisoned abyss. Together their hands would hold onto me as Ancient Royal Families who rule Underworld empires of beauty, bondage, and blood did their best to snuff out our redemption.