warning spoiler alert
I found this book disturbing. Scarlett is a young innocent mafia daughter to a family who is going under. Her sister is supposed to have an arranged marriage but at her engagement party scarlett ends up meeting a masked stranger going home with him and giving him her virginity. she becomes pregnant only to find out that the man who is the father is the man supposed to marry her sister but he calls it off and demands to marry her instead when the sister is caught cheating. Leonid an older mafia bon bent on revenge, ends up treating scarlett badly coldly and with only revenge on his mind so she vows to never tell him the baby is his. he ends up treating her disgustingly thru out the pregnancy keeping her prisoner then when she won't tell him who the father is he takes her newborn away from her at 48 hr old and forces her to give it to her sister. she quits eating and nearly dies so he tells her if she dies he will kill her family plus her newborn. so she makes herself survive from near death but she can't feel any happiness. she sees her baby grown thru videos until one day a maid tells a lie about her and leonid ties her to the headboard and pretty much rapes her saying terribly things to her as punishment. an hour later he takes the step to find out the truth which he could have done previous to find out he made a terrible mistake and will have to make up for it. however he doesn't apologize, he doesn't do anything to make it right other than buy her a few gifts and have them delivered anonymously. meanwhile of course she is going to know he bought them who else would in this mansion he rules with an iron fist. he allows her to see her child at 6 months and due to a threat to bring the baby back home with her where he has set up a nursery because his investigation proves he must be the babies father but he still won't fully admit it to himself. all he had to do was a dna test when the baby was born but apparently too stupid to do that despite it being common sense. and he'd already done an investigation which showed she wasn't around any other men who could have gotten her pregnant. yet he continues to degrade and humiliate her, treat her like garbage, forced her to eat things that made her vomit during morning sickness, yet expects her to be grateful to him and fall for him. no woman is going to fall in love with the mafia boss who treated her terribly for an entire pregnancy, forcibly remove her newborn from her arms and give it away, rape her for something she didn't do, make her accept his advances despite not wanting it, and all is fine because he buys her a few things? i honestly don't know what the author was thinking in this plot. this mafia boss was really too stupid to breath air. so many things were common sense and easily verified yet he did none of it just continuing to treat a woman he had at first been intrigued and attracted to like absolute trash. yes in the end he acted better and did end up saving her father and never died saving her but none of it would have even happened had he just used his brain and acted appropriately in the first place. it also made zero sense that scarlett didn't tell the truth about the baby once they were married and she knew it was truth or lose her child. what woman would let her newborn be ripped away from her when the truth would stop everything. she wrote scarlett as a weak, doormat, insipid, silly woman who just continues to take abuse upon abuse and do nothing to change her circumstances. Leonid was an abusive cold controlling nasty vile man with no redeeming qualities despite the author trying to make him look better by the end.
the book also had a LOT of mistakes, detail errors, etc in it. hard to believe it was actually edited. i do not recommend this book, it was not an enjoyable reading experience.
I received a free copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving a review.