Completely breaking with tradition, this extremely dark romance starts an otherwise entirely M/f series off with a femdom couple. Liv is part of a criminal organization, the fantasy kind, that makes millions abducting and training people for sexual servitude. This was just supposed to be one more job for her, just another mind to break and body to twist to the needs of the future client. She’s learned to be hard, after going through the same process herself, and is ever aware of the lethal consequences for failure. It’s not just her life on the line, the organization takes hostages, promising death… or worse.
However, there’s something about her latest victim, the virginal football star and seminary student Joshua, that gets under her skin. His real submission, his goodness and their intense chemistry are throwing off her careful system. He’s supposed to be for the client. She has plans to follow and people to protect, but it’s all too tempting to take him for herself.
As well as more traditional trigger warnings that are likely implied in the premise or mentioned on the author’s site, if any hint of bad things or the dominant character being put in a submissive position is a limit for you, you will want to skip this one. Liv spends much of the book at the mercy of the man who captured her originally, who still holds a twisted degree of power over her. She’ll break free eventually, but there will be lots of bleak scenes that reinforce Liv is not acting on her own initiative. The relationship between her and Joshua is a real matter of mutual attraction that eventually gets its happily ever after with her still his dominant, but this is not a straight forward power fantasy, it’s a lampshade, permitting us to ride along with evil acts while absolving the heroine for her part in them.
I think it also suffers from not always trusting the heroine to be impressed by the hero unless he can rhinohide and force some vulnerability out of her. Joshua resists to a degree that can sometimes be frustrating (Silver listening to my read along describes it as “rude!!!”). I also think the need to keep her redeemable pulled some punches that didn’t need pulling. It gives you some final act twists to further push that point of her actually being ok, but it probably could have just gotten by on those last bits alone.
Which, I suppose, also needs flagging that this is a deeply silly book. Real sex trafficking is not the plot of Taken, nor are such elaborate investments needed to put vulnerable individuals at the mercy of the wealthy and powerful. How things get resolved also requires a significant perspective shift on just how far the reach of the criminal organization was… but if you are reading a dark romance about kidnapping and then corrupting a virgin college linebacker you probably aren’t demanding detailed and plausible world building. There are moments where I giggled at what wasn’t supposed to be funny and “so bad its entertaining” parts, but the tin is clearly labled.
Besides, its nice to have a heroine who gets to dominate in a way that violates the hero’s consent, stay dominant and stay alive. Many stories will let things go dark, but they often do so at the cost of killing off the heroine, disempowering her, or at least having her end up alone. True, it does so by undermining her own capacity to be evil, but as an experiment on how to pull off the subject matter you could do worse. It’s almost a pity this seems to be the writer’s only foray into femdom because I wouldn’t have mind giving this another shot.
I will also say there’s a very conservative-side-of-true-crime vibe here, in so much that it’s been set in a sort of fantasy otherwise more familiar to the sort of person who warns you traffickers will leave a coin on your car to mark you for being later kidnapped. Nevertheless the hero, for all his gruff resistance, gets to be the hot objectified one and there’s a sort of Eurydice can take care of herself vibe from the heroine. There might be shades of QAnon here, but neither must we assume the writer thinks the world actually works that way. It’s just as plausible to take away that the silly parts make this less grim and exploitational than a more realistic account of how abuse goes down.
Where to Buy: The author actually offers this one for free on her site
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