Rating: 3.5 Stars

Publisher: Courtney W. Dixon

Genre: Dark Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Age Gap (10 Years), Graphic On Page Violence, Romance, Secret Society, Series, Sex Slavery/Trafficking

TW from author: Graphic violence, torture, murder, rape, human trafficking, sex slavery, and other explicit content.

Length: 300 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

Blurb –

He calls me his dark angel, but I’m merely a killer. A bringer of death.

Luca Davenport

He is my angel, sent to be my death bringer to save me from my tormentors and betrayers—those who sold me into slavery when I was only eight years old. Angel came in with guns blazing and black wings that were made to crush his enemies and envelope me in love. He belongs to me and I belong to him. We are destined. After he saves me from my captors, we hunt down the remaining men who had abused me for eleven years to make them pay in blood.

Dante Varga

He is a broken boy of no more than nineteen. He sees me as an angel, but I’m simply a killer. An assassin for hire. I can’t save him. I can’t take care of him. There’s no room left in my dying soul to care about someone. Not anymore. But I can’t turn him away either. I should kill him. He’s a witness. But I feel compelled to protect him at all costs. Saving him will either shatter the ice around my heart or destroy me. Either way, Luca is dangerous.

Reading in order will add more pleasure to the reading experience since some of the books end in a series cliffhanger. But they can technically be read as standalones.

CW: graphic violence, murder, rape, torture, human trafficking, explicit content

** Note: This book has been re-edited in December of 2024. Several grammatical errors have been fixed and some scenes have been adjusted for sensitivity issues. If you download this book before then, these changes will not be available on your Kindle. But you can get it updated. **

Review –

“Death. You are an angel of death, right?”

“I am,” I said carefully.

“You can be my death bringer.”

I highlighted the content/trigger warnings. Please take note of them before reading this book, though they don’t even come close to how descriptive and violent the book is. The last paragraph in the blurb states that ‘some scenes have been adjusted for sensitivity issues’. All I can say is if the book was worse before as far as sensitivity, I’m really glad I didn’t read it then. It was very hard to read, and I ended it kind of wishing I’d have done a DNF early on. Even now, I’m not sure why I didn’t. I guess I just wanted to see sweet Luca happy. However, this is not a happy book. Sure, there’s romance and a HEA, but nothing about this book was happy or sweet, other than Luca.

I’ve held on to this review for quite a while, debating on whether or not I was going to even publish it. Even now – exactly one month after I read it – I’m going back and forth on my rating. I finally decided to just go with it.

Dante, 29, is a contract killer who works for The District, a secret group of paid assassins. His latest job has him taking out 21 people inside a huge house. The 21 consists of bad guys and their security. The job is going well until he sees something that gives him pause, a young man being held captive in one of the rooms. The young man is dressed like a child, and is holding a stuffed rabbit. He’s also wearing a collar. Dante was never told about this man. He knows he should kill him, but a couple of things stop him from doing it. One, he was hired to kill 21 people, not 22. And, two, the guy saves his life when he gets distracted.

Dante never gets distracted.

He couldn’t have been younger than eighteen or nineteen, but the room was designed for a boy younger than ten; not that I had any experience with children, but I remembered being nineteen, and my room definitely didn’t look like this.

He ends up rescuing the boy, with the intention of getting rid of him as soon as possible. That could be done by dumping him off somewhere or killing him. Something has Dante taking him to his home instead.

Luca, 19, was sold to traffickers when he was only 8 years old. I’m not going into detail of what he went through during the 11 years he was held captive. The author does that, often to the point of it being way too much. When Dante saves him, he’s convinced that Dante is his guardian angel, even calling him Angel instead of his name.

A few days later, Dante attempts to get rid of Luca by taking him to a bus station with a lot of cash. That lasts all of two minutes before the guilt hits and he’s turning around and picking him up. Luca can’t survive on his own. He’s not even sure if Luca is his real name. It’s just a name he somewhat remembers hearing at one point. He has no social skills, no identification, no anything beyond what he was forced to endure for over a decade.

I couldn’t live on my own. I didn’t know how. I had been owned for almost as long as I could remember. He would have to kill me if he couldn’t help me, but I hoped I could be his.

Luca wants to hire The District to find and kill all the men who abused him during his 11 years of captivity. He has the means, having stolen something very valuable from his captor before he was rescued. Dante and his found family (The District) begin an investigation that leads them to not only the person who sold Luca, but to all the men who also abused him for all those years. Each man is taken out one by one, with Luca being allowed to handle one of the kills.

During this time, Luca does a lot training at The District – strength training, Taekwondo, and his favorite, archery. Dante insists he know how to protect himself, something that comes in handy at one point.

All that was good, and it was nice watching Luca get justice for what he suffered. But as it’s happening, he and Dante are starting a relationship, including sexual. It’s obvious from the very beginning that Luca is obsessed with Dante. Like I said above, he calls him Angel, his angel. My issue is that Dante was very aware of the sexual abuse Luca suffered, yet he was willing to start a sexual relationship with him. It was done at Luca’s request, and Dante was very sensitive about it all. Nothing was pushed or forced. Even so, I was sitting here thinking how the boy needed serious therapy to help him, not jumping into a relationship with his rescuer.

Despite needing to let him go, I also needed to hold him tighter. To protect him from the horror of the world. But why? He’d been exposed to as much horror as I had already. Still, this protective side of me wanted to be this archangel he claimed I was. To hunt down evil souls who hurt children, expecially this one sleeping in my bed.

Then there’s Dante’s past and what made him the assassin that he is. I honestly didn’t think it could get worse than what was described about Luca, but I was so wrong. The incidents from Dante’s past were described in very graphic, brutal detail. Luca’s was described, but it was told in past tense. This was Dante telling the story as if it just happened. Honestly, I wish I would’ve stopped reading before I got to that point. There was a lot of violence when Dante killed Luca’s abusers, but this, about Dante’s past, was very personal. The one killed, and not by Dante, wasn’t a so-called bad guy.

I’ve read a lot of dark books lately, as I’ve needed to step away from my norm for a bit. While I won’t say this is the darkest I’ve read, I will say that it’s probably the most disturbing outside of Penance by Rick R. Reed. I’ve read thousands of books over the years. I’ve seen graphic violence so descriptive that it had me cringing. But I’ve never read a book like this one where the author describes certain things that honestly don’t need to be described for the reader, for entertainment sake. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

For the record, Penance is brilliantly written, and I consider it one of the best books I’ve ever read. The content was just dark and at times extremely emotional.

I liked Dante well enough. He was good to Luca, nothing was forced, and there was no pressure about anything. As for Luca, I felt that he was clinging to Dante simply because he was his rescuer, the only man to be friendly to him since he was a child. I never felt the love between them, though Dante did a good job of keeping him protected and cared for.

I’m curious about the others in the series, especially Sully’s book, His Bane (#2). Sully is… different.

This is my first by this author. As much as I want to read more, I’m hesitant. Like I said, I’m not new to dark books, and I’m not a prude in any way, but I believe not everything should be front and center for the reader. That’s my opinion.

3.5 stars… I think. 🙂