This was a very lovely, bittersweet read.I greatly enjoyed how the main couples relationship wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. It was gritty, honest, and sometimes painful but it was real. The interaction between the characters was refreshing as well- it was genuine and believable. I appreciated how the main characters had ordeals they had to overcome, instead of leading picture perfect lives.And I greatly appreciated the authors note at the end explaining that not all who participate in S&M activities are embellish monsters. 4.5 Stars!! I’ll give yalls a heads up right from the start. THIS BOOK CONTAINS BDSM IN IT TO A HARD CORE LEVEL. If you are uncomfortable with reading books with that in them, you should NOT read this book. Also, this book contains Male Male relations (as stated above) so if you don’t like those types of books, DO NOT read this one! Now onto the review!! We meet Alexander (what a shock I know!) right from the beginning and we are introduced right away to his form of “therapy” which is visiting a BDSM club to be whipped. Right from the beginning, I could tell that Alexander isn’t doing this because he enjoys it and my heart breaks for him each time he visits Eric (his Dom). You could tell that something had happened to him in his past that he was trying to get past. Usually I don’t like it when you can tell a character is hiding something, but I did like the fact that throughout the story we were told little bits of what had happened to him. Sage’s character, although he was really well written, I felt like there was more time spent on Alexander than him. I think it ended up balancing out in the end of the story though because Sage was more about his strength than anything else. He was able to support Alexander when he needed him to and he was able to help Alexander grow and accept his past. There are many different things that take part in this story, between Alexander and Sage’s relationship , the attempts on peoples’ lives, and of course finding out the truth of Alexander’s past. While there was a bunch happening in the book, I still think it was a very well written and the story flowed really well. If you enjoy the M/M genre, then I do believe you should check this book out!*Received an ARC for honest review*
