I couldn't feel the emotions in this book so I was mostly detached from the characters and their circumstances. Hope is out with her friend at a club or bar where she sees Nico, a Mafia enforcer, but tries to keep her head down as much as possible so that she doesn't attract more of his attention. Eventually, Hope and friend, who is drunk, are ready to go home and call it a night. On their way out the door, Hope and friend are held up when rival Mafia members of Nico's get into the club and start shooting. Hope and friend are tackled to the ground and told to stay. However, when Hope looks up, her friend is gone but she's just in time to see Nico kill the two rival Mafia members. The result? Hope is a witness. If Nico is smart and goes along with Mafia business sense, he'd kill Hope. Except he doesn't but kidnaps her instead.
The rest of the book is Hope and Nico getting closer, building up to a relationship despite how they began. I couldn't get caught up in this story so I was eventually turning pages to finish it before moving on.
Decent story, not terribly original - normal girl witnesses a mob killing, gets abducted by a mobster who should kill her for witnessing his crime but can’t bring himself to do it, he’s afraid of loving anyone because of his tragic past, she’s been abused and/or failed by family in the past, etc. The two problems with this particular narrative are 1) terrible editing. Almost always in the form of missing words. I don’t know how you overlook something like that but it happened often enough to be distracting. And 2) Hope bends over backward to convince Nico to stay with her when he consistently pushes her away. IMO Nico needed to man up and fight for Hope at some point. His character arc doesn’t resolve, and it feels like Hope is settling for him because he was the first guy to be nice to her or notice her.