1.5 stars
Currently free at ARe, apparently book one of the trend to serials. It is short (~8,000 words), in 1st person POV, and a Harry Potter fan-fiction for adults. If I had known of its Harry Potter fan-fiction history, I would not have gotten this since I little care to read fan-fiction.
The main character, on some sort of competition to retrieve a crown from a graveyard (of all places), discovers - to her great frustration and disappointment - that her rival and a Lord Brimstone (of whom she'd been warned to stay away from) have reached the crown first. In her attempt to get the crown and escape during the torture and escape of her rival by Lord Voldemort Brimstone, she gets captured.
The world is imperfectly set up with made-up names which do little to obscure the Harry Potter influence with the cruciatus-like curse and Lord Brimstone's side-kick, Lucius Malf- err, Saven Defur (who happened to have a son who was an annoying classmate of the main character at school) playing key roles in this story. The tired trope of the main character as a squealing virgin with hidden, masochistic fantasies who acted inconsistently with her character description did little to improve matters. I found the language and dialogue at odds with its fantasy-like setting which further separated me from the story.
I skimmed it. I won't be continuing because a) I am very reluctant to pay $2.99 for short stories and b) it is not written well enough for me to be worth $2.99 for something this short. I have read better original erotic fiction on-line for free.