Prologue

Under the big top of Jensen Three Ring Circus, magical performances abound and tantalize the senses, but when the glitz and glory closes for the night, even the circus world cannot escape madness. Acrobat Kate the Great lives and breathes for the tightropes, the trapeze, the aerial hoops. In the air she is a free spirit with boundless joy, but on the ground, she’s a prisoner of unspeakable brutality. As her life spins out of control, a one night dance with the devil lands Kate in Rosenton Home for the Criminally Insane. It is here she is determined to make amends with her sins and to find a cure for her insanity. Her ward mates – a charming farm boy from Texas with a bewitching power to calm Kate, an older Mexican woman obsessed with beauty, a fourteen-year old girl who refuses to eat, a bizarrely upbeat young woman with her eyes on the farm boy, a giant with striking green eyes who lets no one in, and a sixteen-year old young man who shows no emotions beyond pure coldness – are the thin threads between her and becoming engulfed by unseen demons.