Rating: 5 Stars

Publisher: Self-Published

Tags: Dark Gay Romance, MM, Enemies to Lovers, Mafia, Kink, Morally Grey, Trilogy

Length: 408 pages 

Reviewer: Kazza

Purchase At: author’s page

Blurb:

I escaped the beast who bought me at auction. I thought I could take my throne back alone. I was wrong.

I only have one option left.
Go back to the beast.

But this time, I have a muzzle for the monster.
A choke-chain to bring him to heel.
I’ll use him. Control him. Pray that he’ll keep me alive long enough to take what’s mine.

But every night I’m under his roof, the line between strategy and surrender gets thinner. And every fight ends the same way: with his hand at my throat and me begging him not to stop.

He bought me.
He chained me.
He’s still the only thing standing between me and whoever wants me dead.

Losing him would end me.
But letting him break me might be worse.

The Beast Who Broke Me is book 2 of a dark MM romance trilogy following the same couple and ends on a cliffhanger. Expect captivity, obsession, possessiveness, toxic dynamics, and all the red flags. These antiheroes will earn their happily ever after, but they’ll have to fight hard to get there.

Review: 

My hand went to his throat, and he looked up at me with total trust. Instead of strangling him, I kissed him. Instead of killing him, I fucked him.

The Beast who Broke Me starts up directly after the ending of The Beast Who Bought Me, book #1. In a cliffhanger ending, Caligula was white vanned as he snuck out of Damiano Orsini’s house. We now know a rival family has him. The Morellis. Same-old same-old. Some of the mob families want the Clemenza name gone, there are people gunning for him, and others that want Caligula to stay around. There’s quite a degree of game playing happening. Long story short, Caligula promises Luca D’Amato, the Don of the Morelli Family, that Damiano and he are deliriously in love so he can get away from them and be with someone, in a calculated risk kind of way, he can play. No one completely buys it given how much Damiano has spent – literally – obsessing over killing the direct line-heir to the Clemenza name and, potentially, the throne. But Caligula is smart. Quick on his feet. He can size up a room anywhere, anytime and work it like no one else.

“Oh, so you two are, like, a couple?” Finch breaks in. “How totally adorable.”
“I told you,” the Clemenza says, with that ice-cold bite I’ve come to expect from him sometimes. “You don’t understand our relationship.”
I mean, he’s right. Even I have no goddamn clue what’s going on, except that the Clemenza is playing every man in this room. And even though all of us know it, he’s getting away with it.

This book has Damiano really going for broke on Caligula – physically and emotionally. He wants to break him because fuck the Clemenza for leaving when he had just started to trust him. Started to feel things for him. And fuck him being at a low point but still finding that haughty prince within. Damiano does reach tipping point in breaking Caligula this time around but Caligula changes course to remain a force of nature, albeit recalibrated. That Caligula has some feelings for Damiano, against his better judgement, has made it easier for Damiano to get to him at a soul deep level. But the opposite is also very true. Damiano still sees Caligula as his to take, his to break, his property. His. Which means that hate and love are just the flip of a coin. The difference between Damiano and Caligula is that Caligula has far more emotional intelligence. Damiano is an enforcer. He doesn’t want emotion to derail him. But, you know, anger is an emotion, Dami. Still, this is a romance book and we’re inside both men’s heads so we get all the details. All the developing feelings.    

Where book #1 got us through the initial obsessively angry stage of Damiano to a place where he’d really bonded with Caligula in admiration and affection – sure, it was unhealthy AF, but it was theirs – this book takes us back to a deficit of square one. The moment Caligula tells Damiano that he has to play nice with him or he’ll let Finch D’Amato – the Morellli Don’s husband – know in his mandated daily text to him that he’s not okay, his household will pay the price. The implied meaning is they’ll rub out Rosa, Vito, Sammy. The people who are the closest thing to real family that Damiano has. It hits Damiano hard. It’s also not the truth but Caligula wields it as if it were because Damiano nearly kills him when they first arrive back at Damiano’s fortress, he’s so full of renewed anger, dying doesn’t bother him as much as it actually should, so fuck the Morelli’s. But his little family? He can’t let anything happen to them. Caligula hates doing it but if Damiano is going to kill him right off the bat, hanging him over the 5th floor railing, he needs something to buy himself time.

I used his loyalty as a weapon. Pointed it at innocent people like a loaded gun. Exactly what my grandfather did a thousand times over—used human beings as shields, as leverage, as expendable pieces on a board. Nonno Lou never hesitated to threaten someone’s family to get what he wanted.

The search is on for any Clemenza Loyalists and there’s moving and shaking happening within the New York mafia families. It’s interesting. It’s also very much about a rebuilding of the MCs relationship. A rebuilding of who Caligula started out as in book #1 to who he is by the end of this book. Definitely a phoenix rising out of the ashes. All the initial hate Damiano has held for Caligula seems like it’s not right. While the obsessive relationship still feels right, the possession, the hate seems… misguided. He sees how sharp Caligula is. How regal. The sex is the same as book #1 – degradation, rough, aggressive, forceful. Just like Damiano and Caligula like it. Damiano, the giver of the rough. Caligula, taking it. Both of them loving it. Sexually, they’re on fire… if you like it on the edgier side.  

But we are here. Him trembling in my arms, still hard, still desperate, still begging for my touch even after I nearly cracked his ribs.

This is such a good trilogy. I’ve gone back and started reading  the author’s first Mafia series to get some background, and while I’m enjoying what I’ve been reading, I can see how much Greene has polished her writing skills. The other books are fun but these first 2 books of a trilogy are tighter. Grittier. Sexier. Darker. Addictive. Unputdownable. I think about Caligula and Damiano well after finishing. And that ending?! October cannot get here fast enough for the last instalment. That’s how I want my characters. That’s how I love my reading and stories. Memorable. For The Beast Who Broke Me, it’s 5 Stars!