Prey of Mercy

Inspired by the human cost hidden behind a landmark U.S. Supreme Court transportation case, this dark thriller follows Ilyana, a scholarship student from the impoverished nation of Krovia, who arrives at the elite Blackwood University in the city of Meridian. Beneath the campus's ivy-covered walls, she discovers that cruelty is not confined to the streets—it is distilled into a brutal hierarchy by a secret society that feeds a transcontinental human trafficking ring. When a predatory initiation turns into a kidnapping, Ilyana is thrust into a nightmare journey across state lines in freight trucks owned by Atlas Prime Logistics. As she fights to survive the darkness of the trade, she must use every lesson the campus cruelty taught her to dismantle the syndicate from within, only to find that the adult world’s legal machinery is engineered to shield the guilty through binding arbitration clauses. The novel exposes that a university is never a utopia—it is the rehearsal room for the refined savagery of the real world.