SEVERED: A NOVEL
A Web of Lies Series – Book One
Mercy Kesilmiş is forced into the public eye and must confront a buried past that turns her own memories against her.
Back-of-the-book
I’ve spent my life navigating the fractures left by a childhood built on silence, control, and the kind of harm that teaches you how to disappear in plain sight. When violence drags me into the public eye, I become the unwilling center of a story I never meant to tell—one that exposes the people who shaped me, the community that failed me, and the truth I’ve spent years trying not to remember.
As investigators close in and familiar faces resurface with their own versions of my past, I’m forced to confront what I buried and what speaking will cost. What follows is a slow unraveling—a reckoning with identity, autonomy, and the quiet violences that shaped my life.
Excerpt – Severed
Chapter One
Mercy
November 27th, Istanbul, Türkiye
I hate Ed Sheeran now. Not in a way I say out loud — no one cares, and I don’t offer pieces of myself to people who wouldn’t know what to do with them. The hate sits under my ribs, sharp and private.
But that night, I didn’t hate anything.
“Malik, are you sure?” I asked as we moved with the crowd toward the stadium, excitement rising through me like something about to split open. “I know Ed Sheeran isn’t your favorite.”
He smiled down at me, warm and steady. “But he’s yours.”
“It’s your birthday,” I said, looking up at him as the lights pulsed around us.
He shrugged, easy.
⸻
I didn’t know then that the green baseball cap he’d bought me — the one with the multiplication sign stitched in gold — would become the only thing I kept. That it would end up frayed and threadbare, stained with his blood.
Three months later, I was standing at the end of a backstage line, a Post-it note in my hand, Malik’s handwriting smudged across it. About to confront the man who killed him.
© C.M. Seybolts
Author’s Note
A psychological novel shaped by fractured memory and coerced silence — a story carried in the shadows of what Mercy was never allowed to remember, and the cost of finally holding those truths.
Confronting Generational Trauma
Trauma becomes the terrain Mercy must navigate — not to understand, but to hold the truth she was never permitted to keep.
Life After Malik
Everything Mercy becomes is shaped by the moment she lost him — the fracture that defines her story.
What She Survived
Her past is not a threat returning — it’s a wound that never closed, resurfacing through fractured recollection and coercive silence.
