Unbound

In honouring the strength of Project Raven, Kristin Howe personally understands the hesitation of telling your own story. Determined to show the strength that comes from our darkest moments, she is pleased to announce her debut novel, Unbound.

A fictional story inspired by true events, Unbound draws on Kristin’s lived experience as a survivor of human trafficking to explore the unvarnished reality of recovery.

”Once that devil gets hold, it doesn’t let go”

The Story of Piper

Piper, a former paramedic and 911 dispatcher, has spent nearly two decades meticulously constructing a life defined by safety and silence in rural Ontario. A devoted wife and mother, she is determined to protect her two daughters from a darkness she thought was hidden—a legacy that still breathes from the generations before them.

However, the stability she has fought for begins to dissolve when a series of sensory triggers—a hummed melody, a familiar scent—breach her mental defences. When she turns to therapy expecting a quick fix, she unknowingly opens the door to a "Fenrir" she thought was long dead.

As Piper struggles to re-establish a fractured mind-body connection, she fights to contain the jagged pieces of a past she fears will destroy anyone who gets too close. Her present-day EMDR sessions act as the catalyst, threading fragmented memories into an unvarnished reality that refuses to stay buried.

What began as an inquiry into her father’s suicide quickly unravels into a world of uncompromising darkness. She is forced to reconcile the "Jekyll and Hyde" duality of the man who raised her with the truth of her own history: her coerced role in the abduction of a girl named Athena, and the memory of Liam—a boy who existed in the impossible space between her protector and her captor.

Piper’s search for the truth becomes an obsession that threatens the quiet life she has built. As the boundaries between past and present blur, her husband, Jack, struggles to anchor her while the lines between protector and predator wear terrifyingly thin.

Piper begins to realize that the "internal static" she has lived with for decades wasn't a personality flaw, but a survival-driven defence mechanism. But when an entire life becomes a trauma response, the truth carries a heavy price: the potential destruction of everything she holds dear.

unable to keep the floodgates closed, Piper is pulled back into the world of Damian, a charismatic abuser, and Auntie M, the calculated manager of a hub where the souls of children were catalogued and sold. She finally confronts the reality that her mental walls were built to shield her from the impossible truth of her own kidnapping and her harrowing journey through a human trafficking network.

Yet, even in the darkness, a glimmer of grace remains—a gift of love that follows her through the shards of memory on the wings of a Raven.

Piper is forced to untangle the physical and psychological chains that have bound her in a lifetime of torment, realizing that her father’s suicide was not the end of the story, but the final, complicated knot she must untie. By confronting the depth of his betrayal, she moves from a state of mere survival toward active recovery.

The resolution avoids neatness, choosing the hard-won clarity of integration instead. After a final, spiralling night, Piper rejects silence as her only means of survival and reclaims the names the system tried to erase—Raven, Liam, and even Bear, her loyal four-legged companion.

This is Piper's truth.

About the Author

Kristin Howe writes upmarket psychological thrillers and trauma survivor narratives. Her debut novel, UNBOUND, is fiction inspired by true events, drawing on her lived experience as a survivor of human trafficking to explore the unvarnished reality of recovery. Her perspective is further sharpened by a decade in emergency services as a paramedic and 911 dispatcher, providing her work with a unique blend of clinical precision and lyrical, emotional depth. She lives in just outside Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband and two daughters, where she balances her writing with the tactile precision of traditional woodworking and hand-carving.