This is a spoiler-free review!
As I sit down to write this review I kid you not, I cannot remember the male lead's name for the life of me - that is how unmemorable this book was to me. Kiril, my man, you are incredibly forgetful and low-key a horrible little mafia leader. The entire book I was begging him to get hit on the head in the hopes that he would suddenly gain knowledge and wisdom in order to actually do one thing that would make him worthy of being in the mafia. When the man takes roughly seven years to put a plan in motion, I am not cowering in fear of his capabilities - any woman would be able to accomplish what he planned in two days flat. Boring!! Lazy!!
Mallory has the survival instincts of a squirrel with no brain matter. She literally just lets everything happen to her and then whines about it for the entire book, in addition to being incredibly naive and not being able to put two and two together. She is just SO thrilled to see Kiril after all these years and does not do a DROP of investigating or asking around on why he is at the club that all these nasty guys go to... like girl... use your brain! Genuinely one of the most infuriating female leads I have come across in my time as a reader, and as an avid fan of mafia romance, she just gets added to a long list of female leads that are as useful as a bag of rocks.
Boring, boring, boring "friends" to "enemies" to "lovers" that was drier than the desert. There was potential from the summary for this book to amount to something more exciting and lean heavily into the mafia romance genre, but it continued to fall flat and instead felt like a poorly written stalker romance. Kiril basically had to make a choice and ends up in the bratva, and if the author had leaned into him being more "scary" than he was in the book, maybe I would have rated this higher and enjoyed his character more. If you have the time to spare and do not care to waste your minutes of life on reading this, I would still recommend to look the other way and find something else to read.
Mallory literally does not care what Kiril does to her because she literally always forgives him in two seconds flat and continues to run around saying "you didn't hurt me!" as a justification. Girl, he is walking all over you and you are not even putting up a fight! It was mortifying as a woman reading this to see her not even successfully attempt a way to get her into a better situation. There were so many times where I was wishing they would be put in more dangerous situations just so she could get some sense knocked into her and realize that this is not just a game. Kiril's methods to keeping Mallory to himself were so low-effort that I was surprised he even managed to keep her in one place for longer than five minutes.
If you are looking for a mafia romance, go ahead and pass on this one. Sure, it could be a filler book in between your true TBR, but I honestly would not go back and read this again. Since this is a duet, I may find myself in the very far future seeing it to its end, but for now, this story and its characters are closed to me.
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