The following ratings are out of 5:
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Romance: 💚🖤💙❤️💜
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌎
Character development: ☺️😉😀😘🥰
This was an odd one to be certain but I really liked it. It is definitely dark and twisted in it’s own way but in some ways it almost is not, but that has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Because the Hero or anti-Hero as the case may be, is definitely an assassin by trade and I know there is some sort of thought process out there or maybe it is just something I heard in the movies, that if people kill for money and not for the thrill of killing then they aren’t psychopaths or sociopaths (I always get those confused).
Anyway, our boy Ari as well as his friend Lincoln who we see a few times in this book, are assassins and self proclaimed bad guys. Ari even calls himself a Villain on numerous occasions. Though he kills for money, he has no conscience about it and he doesn’t care what the person has done to get a hit put out on them. He figures they probably did something bad, but he doesn’t ask and he feels no guilt. Until one night when he kills a man in his home and makes it look like suicide by gunshot to the head.
The man is supposed to be home alone, but after Ari leaves through the window he turns around and sees the man’s sixteen year old daughter Adeline come in and find her father like that and he sees how she is destroyed by what she sees. It is the first time he feels guilt and from that day forward he becomes her stalker.
Ari is a true stalker, meaning he watches from the shadows and finds out everything about Adeline’s life, but doesn’t make himself known to her. Ari sees that she has issues sleeping, he breaks in when she isn’t home and reads her journals and steals small things from her room, he reads the books she likes and listens to the same music as her. Ari is crazy obsessed with Adeline, he even has Lincoln watch her when he is away on jobs.
Though Ari is attracted to Adeline he only watches her and he doesn’t actually get involved in her life until much later. I don’t want to give anything away about that part because by that time Adaline is married to someone else, but let’s just say things get very complicated between them and though Ari is crazy, he also seems to know Adeline better than anyone ever has. But he also has some huge secrets like the fact that he murdered her father.
There are a lot of things going on in the book, but I loved every minute and the romance between Ari and Adeline was super steamy. Adeline suffers from several sleep disorders such as narcolepsy which includes something where she has vivid dreams and/or nightmares in the space between sleep and wakefulness that may be dreams or hallucinations, she also suffers from crying/screaming/fighting in her sleep and sleepwalking. So it was pretty interesting to learn more about some of these conditions. I almost wish this wasn’t a standalone!
The book was told in dual points of view via dual narration. The narration was done by James Cassidy and Ada Sinclair, both of whom do a terrific job and the only thing that could have made it better was if it had been done in duet narration. Ada has a hesitant yet clear feminine voice that is perfect for Adeline who is struggling to find herself and James has a husky deep voice that works well for Ari.