Reviews

3.75 - 4 stars

These characters are unhinged and hilarious lmao. Most Russian mafia books are I gather. The leads had great chemistry and banter, I love it. I did get bored at the halfway mark and had to take several days off the book, and I'm glad I didn't dnf it. It was rough in some parts but it did get better and more polished after 50%.

Mila was a vegan, cruelty-free hippie while Ronan was basically the "devil" of Moscow. It was Mila's birthday and her father had disappeared on her for a longer-than-normal time. She had this sense of wondering about her place in the world too so it made sense for her to book it out of Miami to Moscow to look for her dad, as well as just see her birthplace.

When she arrived, everyone she thought was associated with her dad was basically scared shitless seeing her in Moscow. This is because Moscow is now ruled by Ronan and her dad, Alexei was kicked out of the city and was in Siberia now I think.

Ronan and Mila's meeting was quite messy. She ended up being followed into an alleyway by this guy, into Ronan's arms in his restaurant. Something happened and Ronan called his doctor for her. He took care of her for a couple of days and was really nice to her, so of course Mila, being a sheltered virgin, fawned over him. Turns out that guy that spooked her was part of Ronan's crew (?), don't really get why the guys were messing with her, maybe because of Alexei, idk. Once the jig was up, Mila was kidnapped by Ronan.

She was held captive in his home, chained naked and all that fun stuff. Met Ronan's brother and his family from book 2 I think. The book was still going pretty rough until the halfway mark, when their relationship started to blossom. Ronan had sex with Mila and took her virginity. He was surprised she was still a virgin because he didn't believe Mia when she had told him beforehand. I love the dynamics of the characters, and not just the leads. The supporting characters were great too.

Ronan's whole plan was to trade her for her father. We soon found out that Mila's mom, a famous opera singer in Moscow, Tatiana was a psychopath that loved to get off on torturing animals and people. While Alexei was a human trafficker that was occasionally helped by Tatiana, he still was a trafficker during all this happening.

Mila was disgusted with him. There was this part where she just completely kinda believed Ronan more than her dad at the point when her and Ronan's relationship was still quite cold. That and her little French conjugation memorize-along irked me but other than that she was a good FMC. The author managed to sneak in little quirks about the leads, it was just amusing to read.

Day of the switcharoo came and Alexei pulled off an explosion on them. He used the distraction to point his gun at Ronan. But Mila noticed and immediately put herself on the line, she got shot. Her getting short caused an unspoken truce between Ronan and Alexei (er,, ok). When she woke up at the hospital, she cut off ties with her dad and reluctantly with Ronan. I think this part could've been written better. I get the complicated "he kidnapped me but I loved him but I couldn't let him think this was acceptable" thing but the way it was written made me think she just cut him off for no good reason (because they both already knew they cared for each other).

Ronan gave her some space for 4 months, she became a model (silently backed by Ronan ofc so she could get jobs easily as a newbie). Then he came back and proposed to her.

This book was self-aware and didn't take itself too seriously but also wasn't too cheesy that it lowered its quality. It was pretty good. Definitely think it could be shorter though, somewhere along 0%-45% mark, a bunch of unnecessary stuff.

Audiobook: the sound mixing was awful. The male narrator's volume was too low while the female narrator was loud. It's the type where the male narrator would chime in even during the female's POV so it was just hell trying to listen to what the guy was saying without destroying my eardrums from the woman's.