Rating: 5 Stars

Publisher: Rina Saint

Genre: Dark Gay Erotic Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Dub-Con, First Time, Forced Proximity, Graphic Violence, Mafia, Romance, Series

Length: 280 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

TW From Author: Dubcon, Choking, Hickeys, Controlling Behavior, Rough Sex, Violence, Torture/brutality, Captivity, Trafficking

Blurb –

I’m a beast pacing around my cage waiting for the next fight. It’s all I have, those brief moments of rage and destruction. It’s a sort of freedom. Then I go back into the cold, dark emptiness.

That’s why I don’t speak anymore. What’s the point? I stopped being human a long time ago. I’ve given up on anything but that cycle of violence and isolation—until they throw him into my cage. They expect me to kill him as soon as he gets me through my injuries. That’s what I usually do. People thrown in with me make so much noise with their begging that I have to kill them to shut them up. But Lucas is different. He’s quiet. Lost. He intrigues me.

So I don’t kill him. I claim him instead.

At first, my handlers are happy. They think he makes it easier to manage me. Control the beast by controlling its possession. Beasts are simple like that.

What they don’t realize is that he’s waking up the man I used to be—and that man is a hell of a lot more dangerous than the beast.

* Possession contains dark and potentially triggering content. A content list can be found in the ebook sample.

Review –

Blood and honor…

Just… wow. This book had it all. I highly suggest taking note of the above trigger warnings if you plan to read this. While the relationship between Roman and Lucas is sweet in a warped kind of way, it doesn’t start out that way.

Lucas makes the mistake of going somewhere with his former stepfather, Frank. Frank kicked him out a few years before, so it’s more than a little surprising that he’s wanting to see Lucas now. That surprise goes away quickly when Lucas realizes that Frank didn’t invite him out of the kindness of his heart. Not even close. Let’s just say that Lucas was a bit of ‘insurance’ if certain things went sideways. And they did; go sideways, I mean. Frank took Lucas to a building where illegal fights occur, with rich and poor alike in attendance. Thanks to Frank, Lucas is thrown into a cell with a man they called Beast, the meanest fighter of all. Lucas is told he’s to take care of him, and change his bandages as needed because he’d been severely injured in his last fight moments before. Beast has killed all the others before Lucas who tried to help him. They figured he’d do the same to Lucas.

They were wrong.

And this is where the romance between Lucas and Beast begins. His real name is Roman, the name I’ll be using throughout the rest of my review, but that doesn’t come out until a little bit into the book. Roman could easily kill much smaller Lucas, and again, that’s kind of what Roman’s handlers had hoped. Only that doesn’t happen. What happens is that Lucas, while scared, literally wants to take care of him. This brings out a somewhat softer side of Roman, who doesn’t talk to anyone until later. He didn’t have to because he and Lucas communicated just fine without words.

Roman becomes very protective of Lucas, especially when guards and handlers come to his cell. This starts before they ever have sex. As for their first time… I wouldn’t call it completely consensual. Even so, after the first time, Lucas is happy to offer himself anytime Roman wants him. He’d only been with a couple of women before, and he had problems getting an erection. With Roman, it’s the opposite. It’s like he’s awakened something inside Lucas.

There’s a lot of anger in this book. Roman has been forced to fight, to kill, for others to make money. He’s been stuck in a cell for a long time, though he doesn’t know how long. He finds out later, but while he’s there, days and nights don’t matter.

One thing that does happen is that pretty much from the beginning Lucas become Roman’s #1, and he knows that neither of them will be making it out of that cell alive. It’s up to him to find a way out, to keep Lucas safe, protected.

I probably should’ve been bothered by a few things that happened in the first half of the book while both men were in captivity. Strangely, I wasn’t. At first, I thought Lucas was so desperate for love, for attention, that he pretended what Roman was doing was okay. Then I realized that to him, it really was okay.

I can’t say a lot about the second half of the book without giving a lot of spoilers. They obviously escape, and Lucas learns who Beast/Roman really is. He’s Roman Constantine, the third in line in the Constantine crime family. His brother, Vitali, thought Roman was dead, so imagine his surprise when he and Lucas show up at their gated home out of the blue. Well, there was a bit more to it than that, including a lot of violence, but suddenly Roman is having to learn to live a normal life again. This, while trying to remember what happened to make him disappear. Of course, Lucas is right there with him, keeping him grounded, letting him know he’s loved. All it took was a touch, a glance, from Lucas and that former beast inside Roman would calm down, settle.

There’s a lot of sex in this book, with most of it being pretty rough. Roman is constantly dealing with anger issues and trying to live a normal life again – or normal for a man in a crime family anyway. He has to protect Lucas at all costs, especially since he doesn’t remember how he disappeared. The threat is still there, even if they did get out of the cell they’d been in.

It took me a minute, but I did figure out who the bad guy was. Or should I say, the worst guy. Almost all of them were bad, except Vitali and his bodyguard, Quinn.

I absolutely loved this book. I loved rough Roman, whose only goal in life is to keep Lucas safe. He would burn the world down for the man he loves, but his big and bad self was scared of horror books. That was cute, and it made him seem a bit more human.

“Do you want me to read?” I ask. He likes when I read to him. I like it too.

“Yes,” he says. Then, “Hold on, what are you reading?”

“The Stand.”

“Fuck.”

“I also found a great copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, if  you’d prefer that.”

He nips my ear. “Are you making fun of me?”

I chuckle. “A little…”

I loved Lucas, who saw through Roman’s terrifying exterior to see the man he was underneath. I love Vitali, and I kind of got a kick out of Quinn. Their story is next, Confession. I’ll be jumping into that one as soon as I’m done typing this review.

This book won’t be for everybody. It’s dark, brutal, and the love story between Roman and Lucas most definitely isn’t what anyone would call normal. When I say Roman’s protective of Lucas, I mean he’s really protective. He doesn’t want him out of his sight, even for a moment. He doesn’t even want him in the same room with other men, something he slowly started working on. A lot of progress had been made by the time the book ended. As for the ending… it was perfect, and it made me smile big.

An easy 5 stars.