Everyone Loves a Good Tease

I have officially reached the point where I am terrible at keeping AHGWR Vol. 2 to myself.

So, here we are.

The second book in the AHGWR Cycle officially has a title: The Gospel of Heretics.

I’m currently deep in the editing and polishing stage, with a tentative release planned for December 2026. There is still tons of work ahead, but the story itself is very much alive, breathing, and causing problems—which feels appropriate for this particular group of characters.

For the first teaser, I wanted to share a piece of the prologue.

Without giving too much away, The Gospel of Heretics digs much deeper into Selene’s past and the experiences that shaped the person we eventually meet in All Hungry Gods Wear Red. Some of those answers are illuminating. Some are uncomfortable. And some may make you look at things from the first book a little differently.

Fair warning: parts of this book go into darker territory—personally, I think even more so than the first. I’ve tried to approach those moments with realism and respect, rather than shock value, but telling this particular part of the story honestly means going places that aren’t always comfortable.

And, of course, this is still the AHGWR Cycle—so the past is only part of a much larger problem.

There are consequences waiting in the present, old choices refusing to stay buried, and more than a few people discovering that one person’s decisions have a nasty habit of becoming someone else’s problem.

For now, though, I’ll behave (probably) and leave you with the prologue.

—AMV

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Lena

Broussard, Louisiana

Wednesday, August 15th

Age 17

The house was quiet in a way Lena had never known.

Her father was first—not by design, just convenience. Benedict slumped in his recliner, the television still glowing faint blue against the wall, a beer bottle sweating in his hand. The strike landed perfectly. Ribs gave way beneath the force, his chest collapsing inward like rotten timber. He groaned once, but it didn’t last. His body hit the carpet with a dull thud, mouth slack, wet eyes wide and glassy. Lena nudged him with her foot, rolled him onto his side, and left him there.

Her mother was next. Geneviève was too high to fight when Lena’s hands squeezed hard around her neck. Fingers dug into soft tissue until cartilage shifted, and the shallow gasps shortened, then stopped completely. She set the corpse upright in the kitchen chair, folding the arms neatly across the lap. The head lolled forward, dark hair sliding over her cheek, as though she were only dozing.

The neighbor’s wife was last. Lena opened the front door, greeted her without expression, and closed it firmly behind her. A blow to the temple sent her stumbling into the wall, the second finished it. Lena crouched, gripped the wrists, and dragged her across the floor. Her knees scraped against the rug until they burned. She rolled the dead woman onto her back, straightened the arms and legs, adjusted her dress, and opened the window so the night air would stir the curtains.

Everything in its place.

But it wasn’t enough.

The scene was too neat, too methodical. If it looked clean, it would look staged. Rage was never tidy. Passion always left a mess.

She took the knife from the sink and drew it across fabric, limbs, and already-stilled flesh. Shallow cuts across her father’s arms, a slice at her mother’s neck, just enough to coax the blood to flow. Then she lifted their hands—limp, cooling, but still useful—and dragged the fingers across the walls, pressed them into the carpet, smeared them across the table’s veneer. Palm prints. Streaks. To anyone else, it would look like they had clawed, flailed, fought their own impending death.

When she stepped back, the house screamed violence. A jealous man would not leave order behind. He would leave this—chaos.

The cop next door wasn’t home. His patrol car had left an hour before—routine shift, same as always. But she’d left him a delay: a roofing nail pressed into the tread. Not with the intention to completely strand him, just enough to force a stop and steal a few minutes.

The key factor being that he was alone. The only witnesses present would be the Louisiana bayou wildlife. Later, it would be the gap in his timeline, a hole no one could corroborate.

Before she began, Lena watched the headlights fade down the road from the bathroom window and marked the time. When he returned, the bodies would be cooling, the story already written for him. His absence would not protect him. It would damn him.

She paused after the staging to glance at her own hands—mostly clean, only a thin film of red at the cuticles—and carefully retraced her steps. Doorknobs she’d touched were wiped again and again until her fingers burned. No trace of her skin in the blood she had spread. The knife itself she carried by its handle wrapped in cloth, crossing the darkened yard to the neighbor’s back door. She slid it into his trash bin beneath beer cans and cigarette packs, half-hidden but not buried, the way a guilty man might try to rid himself of it without courage to finish the job.

By morning, it would read like desperation. His panic. His atrocities.

Not hers.

In his den, wedged between tax folders and VHS rentals, sat a narrow container no bigger than a shoebox. Inside were tapes—some labeled, most not. She slid three into a pillowcase, careful and silent. She already knew what was on them. They weren’t for the police. They were for her. A ledger. A record. Insurance that what had been taken from her would not vanish into silence.

The narrative was written perfectly: Husband jealous. Wife unfaithful. Neighbors corrupt and complicit. Rage, escalation, violence. The police would believe it—the parish would call it a tragedy.

After the stage was set, the rest of the cleanup was just procedure. Clothes stripped off and fed to the fire pit out back, the smell of smoke and scorched fabric clinging to her skin. Nails scrubbed raw in the scalding sink water until the cuticles bled.

By the time she was done, the story was sealed.

Then came the last task of the night.

The bathroom reeked of bleach layered over cheap cigarette smoke, sharp enough to sting her nose. She sat on the edge of the tub, knees drawn close, towel pressed firm between her pale thighs. Her legs shook as the pain burned through her hips, but her face didn’t move. Blood ran in thin rivulets down her calves, pooling against her bare heels. A metal coat hanger lay rinsed, but not clean, in the sink—a faint sheen of rust and red streaked across the wire.

Her explanation of survival required no effort of invention. She had been left alive. The innocent girl, mercifully spared. The blood between her legs would only make the story more horrid. They would call it evidence, proof of violation, one more detail of a man’s depravity. The cop’s reputation would do the rest of the work for her.

No one would question it. They never did.

The abuse had started when she was twelve, someone she trusted pressing what they called “candy” onto her tongue. At the time she had believed them, until the haze overcame her—limbs heavy, the room spinning, memory cutting in and out like a broken reel.

By her teens she knew better. She had spent enough nights watching Benedict and Geneviève grind down pills with the backs of spoons, mixing the dust into cheap liquor. Her father’s speech would slur. Her mother’s eyes would glaze over. Sometimes they fought, sometimes they didn’t care enough to move. Lena had catalogued it all with quiet precision: the unfocused stupor of benzodiazepines, the sudden drops into sleep that looked too much like unconsciousness, the bitter aftertaste that clung to the back of her throat.

It had never been candy. It had been sedatives. Whatever her parents or the neighbors had on hand, whatever they wanted to use. Drugs to keep her pliant. A fog to make her body easier to handle.

So many faceless others passed over the years in a blurred, continuous daze—some forgettable, some plastered on posters and smiling from television screens. Her father had allowed it, treating her like currency. Her mother had known and ignored it. The neighbor’s wife had supplied the pills, sliding them across counters like party favors. And the man who finally left her pregnant after years of violation had known too—and laughed in her face before running off.

The abortion she just performed wasn’t the hardest part of the night. It was only the last. She didn’t care if it left her unable to carry children. She had never wanted them. The idea of being tethered to another life, obligated to softness, was repellent. Children meant vulnerability. She could never allow either.

She raised her head toward the bathroom mirror. Staring at the streaked glass, she thought of the first mirror she had broken at eight-years-old—another house, another bathroom. The slice across her palm was shallow but stinging. Geneviève had not even checked the wound. She had slapped Lena across the mouth instead—for breaking something, for leaving a mess behind.

That same year she had planted flowers by the fence—red ones, her favorite color—the only thing in the yard she liked. The neighbor’s dog had ruined them again and again, tearing up roots and scattering petals. Neither her parents nor the people next door had bothered to stop it. They hadn’t cared about the flowers. They hadn’t cared about her.

So she had waited one day with a rock. When the dog came back, she struck until the body stopped moving. Its cries had been shrill and loud. But she had felt nothing. No guilt. No thrill. Only relief when it was over.

Now, in the mirror, her nearly-black hair hung in wet strings, collarbones cutting harsh lines. Her skin was nearly colorless, her lips pale. Her icy-blue eyes, too large for her face, stared back unbothered. Her hands—long, bony fingers—didn’t shake.

Just seventeen.

But not a child. Not prey. Never again.

From this point forward, she would be the one who decided everything—what punishment was deserved, who needed to bleed, what could be erased.

And anything that stood in the way would be handled.

Advance Preview — The Gospel of Heretics

© 2026 Alexandria Malott-Vaňková. All rights reserved.

This excerpt is from The Gospel of Heretics, an unpublished manuscript and Volume 2 of the AHGWR Cycle. It is shared here as an advance preview for readers. Please feel free to share a link to this post, but do not copy, reproduce, repost, upload, publish, or distribute the excerpt itself, in whole or in part, without the author’s written permission. The manuscript is still in development, and content within this preview will differ from the final published edition.