Rating: 3.5 Stars

Publisher: Dafne Kross

Genre: Gay Paranormal Romance

Tags: Dark, Dub/Non-Con, Romance, Series, Vamps

Length: 100 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

TW: Dub/Non-Consensual sex scene.

Blurb –

I waited until 5:55 AM to quit. Five minutes before the sun rendered him comatose.

I am the Dayman for the Vane Coven.

For ten years, I’ve run the city while the monsters sleep. I bribe the mayor, I launder the blood money, and I ensure the blackout curtains are drawn tight. I am the most powerful man in the city—until the sun goes down.

Then, I am nothing but a servant to him.

Lord Nikolae. Six hundred years of lethal instinct wrapped in an Armani suit. He is arrogant, cruel, and refuses to learn how to use a smartphone. He treats me like a piece of furniture, expecting me to clean up his kills and manage his empire without a word of thanks.

I’m done. I’m burned out. So, I leave my resignation letter on his coffin and walk out into the morning sun, the one place he can’t follow.

But I forgot one thing: Nikolae doesn’t know the passwords to the offshore accounts.

Now night has fallen, and the most dangerous predator in the city is awake, furious, and locked out of his own penthouse. He’s tearing the city apart to find me.

He doesn’t just want his Chief of Staff back. He wants to punish me for leaving.

Nikolae is about to learn that if he wants me to handle his empire by day, he’s going to have to beg for it by night.

Review –

Apparently my reading theme right now is vampires. I read a series of three short vampire stories, and Amazon did what Amazon does… it recommended me dozens of vampire books. This one looked good, so here I am.

Caleb, the Dayman or the Chief of Staff of Vale Coven, has worked for Nikolae for ten years. Human, he’s able to handle matters during the daytime hours that Nikolae and the others in the coven can’t. Being vampires, they go into a comatose state right at dawn, and are basically paralyzed until the sun goes down again. The humans who work for the coven are called daywalkers.

Caleb absolutely despises Nikolae. He’s been cleaning up the vampire’s messes for a decade without so much as a thank you. Not even once. Caleb bribes the mayor, has dead bodies cleaned up after coven members kill, and he handles all things financial. Nikolae probably doesn’t even know what a password is, much less what they are to everything.

Nikolae treats Caleb like a servant. Caleb has finally had enough. He types up a nice and professional resignation and places it on Nikolae’s chest only moments before he wakes up. He changes his mind at the last minute about being professional. He types a new resignation letter that’s basically a big ‘fuck you Nikolae and the horse you rode in on…’

Ten years of this shit. Ten years of cleaning up blood splatter from silk carpets, of transferring funds through seventeen shell companies, of making excuses for missing socialites who’d ended up as midnight snacks.

And not a single fucking thank you.

Of course, Nikolae finds Caleb mere hours after his escape. His punishment for leaving is rough sex. I had orginally typed non-con because he basically took Caleb by force, but Caleb wanted it, enjoyed it, so I changed it to dubious instead of non-consensual. If either is a trigger to you, you might not want to read this.

Caleb is all about being taken by the strong vampire, so he agrees to go back to his position at the coven but with conditions. No more treating Caleb like a servant when he – Caleb – is the one keeping the coven running in the first place.

When they arrive back, their relationship has changed. No longer is Caleb looking at his boss as a pretentious bastard. He’s now seeing him as a lover, and maybe something more.

There’s some drama when a rival coven gets violent as they attempt to take over Vane Coven. There may or may not be somebody on the inside helping the rival coven. Then there’s the fact that not all the board members are pleased that a human, that would be Caleb, has been given more authority; authority he didn’t have before he ran off. He’d had a lot before, but now he has Nikolae beside him instead of taking him for granted.

The reader finds out who the bad guy is early on. It’s just finding a way for Nikolae and his vampires to eliminate the problem. It takes a deeper bond between Caleb and Nikolae to make it happen.

After the first time, their sex scenes were pretty hot. Their relationship is now as a couple, not boss and employee. They declare their feelings in their own way.

All that was good, though I never truly felt them together as far as chemistry. Even so, it was okay.

There’s an inconsistency that bugged me. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it had I not thought, “Oh, okay, this is a vampire who can’t be seen in a mirror,” unlike most of the vampire books I read these days.

During the first sex scene at 11%, Nikolae couldn’t be seen in a mirror.

During a later sex scene, at 42%, he’s visible in the mirror, and then again a few seconds later.

Maybe a minor detail, but it stood out to me. Had such a big deal not been made about how he couldn’t see him during their first sex scene I probably would’ve overlooked it.

The main issue I had with this book was one of my biggest reading pet peeves – it had a rush, rush ending. I’m not referring to Caleb and Nikolae’s relationship. I’m talking about when the bad guy was caught/killed/whatever. There’s an epilogue that says a little bit – a VERY little bit – about what happened, but it’s in a ‘Thinking back on that day as we do something else before we have a long, drawn out, and totally unnecessary sex scene…’ type of scenario. It was extremely underwhelming, and honestly, frustrating. I wanted to see it play out, not just be an afterthought. They had threatened Caleb, had tried to kill Caleb, and it got a line or two about it, with no details other than they were killed. It then went on to the above-mentioned unnecessary sex scene.

Nikolae and Caleb get their happily-ever-after. The End.

I obviously enjoyed the book because I gave it 3.5 stars, but I swear the epilogue had me wanting to throw my Kindle. There was so much build-up with the drama for… nothing.

Did I say how much I truly hate rush, rush endings???? 🙂

I think this is my first by this author. After finishing this, I went back and started on the next book in the series, Daylight & Dust. It was a DNF at 66% for reasons I mention in my quickie Goodreads review. I’m unsure at this point if I’ll be continuing with the series or this author.

3.5 stars.

Equals. After ten years of servant and master, of daywalker and lord, we had finally found balance – a partnership forged in blood and trust and something dangerously close to love.