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Realm of the Wicked
All she ever wanted was to keep her little sister safe.
All he ever wanted was her.
When Stella’s beloved younger sister Grace falls ill and is given just months to live, she will do anything in her power to save her.
But she never expected the Devil to answer her prayer.
That night, Damien steps from the shadows of Stella’s bedroom, devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful, ready to collect the soul she was desperate enough to promise in exchange for her sister’s life.
Dragged beyond the mortal world into the Fringe, a decadent realm suspended above Hell, Stella finds herself surrounded by demons who wear silk and smiles like weapons, shadows that whisper secrets and Hell’s ruthless Council, who are eager to claim what she owes.
Every day in Damien’s estate brings new dangers, and a dangerously intoxicating kind of protection. Charming, arrogant and infuriatingly magnetic, Damien insists he can keep her safe… and maybe even save her soul.
Stella knows better than to trust him. He’s dangerous, and his kingdom is built on deception. But worse than the lies is the pull between them – dark, irresistible and impossible to ignore.
And in the realm of the wicked, the only thing deadlier than losing your soul is losing your heart…
Praise for Torri
“Left me speechless. I can't begin to express how much I enjoyed this story. This is absolutely a must read.”
“THIS BOOK GETS A MILLION STARS!!!!! Torri Heat is amazing for coming up with this book!!!”
“I was HOOKED. This story sunk its claws in deep and refused to let go.”
All he ever wanted was her.
When Stella’s beloved younger sister Grace falls ill and is given just months to live, she will do anything in her power to save her.
But she never expected the Devil to answer her prayer.
That night, Damien steps from the shadows of Stella’s bedroom, devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful, ready to collect the soul she was desperate enough to promise in exchange for her sister’s life.
Dragged beyond the mortal world into the Fringe, a decadent realm suspended above Hell, Stella finds herself surrounded by demons who wear silk and smiles like weapons, shadows that whisper secrets and Hell’s ruthless Council, who are eager to claim what she owes.
Every day in Damien’s estate brings new dangers, and a dangerously intoxicating kind of protection. Charming, arrogant and infuriatingly magnetic, Damien insists he can keep her safe… and maybe even save her soul.
Stella knows better than to trust him. He’s dangerous, and his kingdom is built on deception. But worse than the lies is the pull between them – dark, irresistible and impossible to ignore.
And in the realm of the wicked, the only thing deadlier than losing your soul is losing your heart…
Praise for Torri
“Left me speechless. I can't begin to express how much I enjoyed this story. This is absolutely a must read.”
“THIS BOOK GETS A MILLION STARS!!!!! Torri Heat is amazing for coming up with this book!!!”
“I was HOOKED. This story sunk its claws in deep and refused to let go.”
258 pages, Hardcover
Published September 11, 2026
About the author
Torri Heat
31 books469 followersTorri Heat has control over everything in her life, except for the plot. Her characters demand centre stage, and she just goes along with whatever they want and hopes for the best. You never know whether you’ll end up with a dragon tail or on a submarine, but you will always get a taste of darkness with your romance. Her fierce women will inspire you to be sassy, and her dominant men will teach you how to be a good girl. When she isn’t creating alternate realities, you can find her working her other job as a nacho connoisseur.
Torri is represented by Katie Monson at SBR Mediakatie@sbrmedia.com
Torri is represented by Katie Monson at SBR Mediakatie@sbrmedia.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
September 15, 2026
I really wanted to love this one more but not much really happened until 50% in and I just felt the pacing of this one wasn’t great. I had a hard time with the FMC and MMC as I just didn’t think there was a connection. The cat though… probs my fave character 🤭
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
5 ⭐️♾️
Boldwood books, what are you doing to me?! Ever since I was so graciously auto-approved on NetGalley (someone please pinch me, endless forehead kisses for you all!!) every book I've picked up has been a five-star banger, and Realm of the Wicked was no exception!! Thank you Boldwood Books for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are entirely my own.
Thank you Boldwood Books for giving me another book to obsess over, Relam of the Wicked, is easily one of my favourite dark romantasy reads of 2026!!
I'm such a sucker for a dark romantasy and if not for the gorgeous cover, then by how intrigued I was at the premise of the devil being madly obsessed with a human, there was no way I couldn't pass this up, I had even abandoned my current read, whoops.
The tension between Stella and Damien had me WANTING TO BURST AT THE SEAMS OMGGG, it was so freaking good!!! That and the banter between them, had me howling with laughter, Damien had no business being so sassy!! I loved it, I loved them even more, I had devoured this in just over a day because I needed to know what would happen.
I absolutely loved and adored Stella, she was such an incredible FMC. She was so selfless, especially when it came to her younger sister, but in putting others first, forgot about her own wants, needs and desires. Enter Damien, the devil, who has been watching over Stella reverently, almost like a guardian angel would and will do anything for her. You couldn't convince me otherwise that he wasn't put on her path and the earth, to exist in Stella's orbit, he was a man obsessed and who put the earn in yearning!!
The ending quite literally had me holding my breath because I really couldn't have anticipated how this would have gone down, but thank goodness for Agatha. I could burst with happiness at Damien and Stella's new lease of life together; I would very much love to see them, months, or even years down the line, madly obsessed and in love with each other.
tropes
☠️ dark romantasy
💜 enemies to lovers
✨ obsessive and unhinged devil
🖤 shadow daddy
🥀 gothic underworld setting
✨ soul bargain exchange
Boldwood books, what are you doing to me?! Ever since I was so graciously auto-approved on NetGalley (someone please pinch me, endless forehead kisses for you all!!) every book I've picked up has been a five-star banger, and Realm of the Wicked was no exception!! Thank you Boldwood Books for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are entirely my own.
Thank you Boldwood Books for giving me another book to obsess over, Relam of the Wicked, is easily one of my favourite dark romantasy reads of 2026!!
I'm such a sucker for a dark romantasy and if not for the gorgeous cover, then by how intrigued I was at the premise of the devil being madly obsessed with a human, there was no way I couldn't pass this up, I had even abandoned my current read, whoops.
The tension between Stella and Damien had me WANTING TO BURST AT THE SEAMS OMGGG, it was so freaking good!!! That and the banter between them, had me howling with laughter, Damien had no business being so sassy!! I loved it, I loved them even more, I had devoured this in just over a day because I needed to know what would happen.
I absolutely loved and adored Stella, she was such an incredible FMC. She was so selfless, especially when it came to her younger sister, but in putting others first, forgot about her own wants, needs and desires. Enter Damien, the devil, who has been watching over Stella reverently, almost like a guardian angel would and will do anything for her. You couldn't convince me otherwise that he wasn't put on her path and the earth, to exist in Stella's orbit, he was a man obsessed and who put the earn in yearning!!
The ending quite literally had me holding my breath because I really couldn't have anticipated how this would have gone down, but thank goodness for Agatha. I could burst with happiness at Damien and Stella's new lease of life together; I would very much love to see them, months, or even years down the line, madly obsessed and in love with each other.
tropes
☠️ dark romantasy
💜 enemies to lovers
✨ obsessive and unhinged devil
🖤 shadow daddy
🥀 gothic underworld setting
✨ soul bargain exchange
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Hell Runs on Souls. The Fringe Runs Suspiciously Often on Dinner.
Torri Heat’s “Realm of the Wicked” is at its best when infernal bureaucracy, gothic menace, caregiving fatigue, possessive desire, cats, roses, and household routine all collide in the same strange romance
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 3rd, 2026
Devils arrive rather late to “Realm of the Wicked.” Before Torri Heat sends one to Stella Whittier’s riverside bench, she has established the more ordinary disciplines by which a person can disappear. Stella’s younger sister, Grace, is dying; their parents are already dead. For a decade Stella has been guardian, breadwinner, advocate, nurse and keeper of whatever terror Grace cannot be expected to carry. When a doctor recommends hospice, Stella reaches instinctively for one more treatment, one more chance, one more thing she can do. She eventually admits that the decision belongs to Grace, but surrender does not come naturally to someone who has spent years making herself useful enough to hold disaster off. By the time Stella offers the Devil her soul for her sister’s life, the literal bargain feels less like a rupture than an escalation. She has been giving herself away in installments for years.
Even before Damien names a price, Stella has learned to understand love as expenditure. College plans can change. Grief can wait. Sleep can wait. Fear can certainly wait if Grace is watching. She smiles because Grace needs a smile and keeps functioning because somebody has to. Damien merely introduces infernal bookkeeping to a ledger Stella already keeps. His resemblance to Stella is not especially flattering to either of them. She gives herself away to make other people safe; he has spent an eternity deciding, usually without consultation, who needs saving and what the rescue should cost.
Most Faustian tales depend on fine print. Heat’s comes in excellent tailoring. Stella tells a mysterious stranger she would give anything to save Grace; he takes “anything” with professional literalism. Grace’s scans clear. Damien appears in Stella’s bedroom to collect. He is the Devil, though “Devil” proves closer to an office than a species, and he removes Stella to the Fringe, a realm between Earth and Hell. Long-term residents ordinarily surrender their souls into stasis, and those souls help power Hell. Damien was supposed to take Stella’s. Instead he keeps it intact, which gives Hell’s Council both an administrative problem and, in Clarissa, a vindictive one.
Enter the Fringe’s gothic mansion, where dread keeps tripping over domestic routine. Enchanted corridors, hungry shadows, a Hellhound and a rearranging forest share space with books, meals, music, gardening, the formidable Agatha and Stella’s enormous Maine Coon, Archie. Hell may run on souls, but the Fringe runs suspiciously often on dinner. Damien can threaten apocalyptic violence and then worry that Stella is cold. His smoke, first a sign of anger, later settles around her shoulders like a blanket. The contrast does more than make him charming. The longer Stella stays, the less the estate feels like the architecture of punishment and the more it resembles a home nobody involved knows how to admit they want. Eternity keeps being interrupted by household detail.
The sharper joke is that Damien understands Stella before Stella understands Damien. He tells her she has spent so long saving other people that she has forgotten herself. Stella immediately asks who saved him. He retreats behind the Devil’s desk, glasses and all. He never needed saving, he says, which is how we know that he did. Stella surrendered the future she imagined in order to raise Grace; Damien, once human, surrendered his own soul in an earlier act of familial sacrifice and ended up in his infernal post. Each can spot the other’s martyr complex across a room and miss his or her own at point-blank range. For two people so preoccupied with rescue, they are wonderfully bad at receiving it.
Rather than ask syntax to carry the seduction, Heat writes for pulse. Her prose is colloquial, profane, fragment-friendly and emotionally declarative. Stella’s questions chase one another when anxiety takes over; repetition marks the moment attraction or fear outruns composure. Damien’s chapters swell into something more florid and obsessive, though the ancient Devil thinks and swears with striking modernity. Heat wants very little distance between feeling and reader. Sometimes that directness is exactly right; sometimes the scene has already delivered the emotion before the narration circles back to make sure it arrived. The plot is compressed; the feelings occasionally secure rent control.
If the figurative language tends toward familiar cracks, walls, darkness and people threatening to shatter, the objects are better behaved. Yellow clothing, smoke, ledgers and roses accrue meaning without requiring a speech. Damien’s thornless roses preserve a memory of his mother. The ledgers reduce destiny to something unnervingly close to office work. Yellow becomes Stella’s ordinary warmth inside the Fringe’s theatrical gloom. Heat is often subtler with a sweater than with a declaration of eternal devotion, which is a compliment to the sweater and a warning to the declaration.
Perhaps the book’s best formal decision is simply to keep Damien out of our heads at first. Stella owns the opening five chapters, so the bargain, Grace’s cure and Damien’s arrival retain their menace. Only after he has taken Stella to the Fringe does his first-person narration begin. From there his chapters appear less to repeat events than to disturb Stella’s version of them. Three retrospective movements – eight years ago, five years ago, two years ago – reach into a history she thought was hers alone and quietly leave his fingerprints on it.
Across those flashbacks, fascination becomes protection, protection becomes surveillance, and surveillance becomes obsession. Damien first notices Stella after her parents’ deaths because he sees her hide her own grief for Grace. He later intervenes against an assailant and an exploitative landlord. Then the ledger says Stella should die in a car accident, so Damien lets himself into her apartment and sabotages enough of her morning routine to make her leave late. Coffee machine, hot water, charger: providence by household nuisance. It is funny, intimate and faintly horrifying, eternal devotion expressed through a broken coffee maker. The clever part is the timing. Each new trespass appears only after the last one has begun to look, from inside the romance, rather like kindness.
Perfect attention is the fantasy and the problem. Damien remembers Stella’s dislikes, abandoned plans, favorite color, even how old she was when she learned to ride a bicycle. For Stella, who has spent years doing the noticing for everyone else, such knowledge lands with enormous force. Somebody has seen the labor people around her simply accepted. Yet he knows these things because he watched when she did not know she was being watched. The same fact produces the comfort and the alarm. Heat does not always press hard enough on that contradiction, but the romance is more interesting whenever she leaves it exposed.
At the Council dinner, Stella hears the contradiction in Damien’s own language. Clarissa demands her soul; Damien answers that because he collected Stella, the soul is his to keep, destroy or return as he chooses. He means to shield her. Stella still hears two powerful beings discussing her as property. For a moment villain and lover share a grammar, and she wonders whether either sees a woman or merely leverage. Damien’s intention is not trivial, but neither is Stella’s recoil. Earlier, Stella had to accept that Grace’s body and end-of-life choices belonged to Grace. Damien is slower to learn the corresponding lesson about Stella.
Dark romance does not owe us exemplary courtship; exemplary courtship would rather spoil the adjective. Heat plainly knows the appeal of danger, possession and the fantasy of surrender, and her later erotic scenes give Stella considerably more room to choose, ask and pursue than the premise might suggest. The real strain lies elsewhere. Damien can respect an erotic yes while still making enormous decisions about Stella’s life without one. She repeatedly pushes against that habit. The novel lets the argument continue, though its great fondness for Damien occasionally files down the teeth before they have quite finished biting.
If anyone might have made that bite sharper, it is Clarissa. Late in the novel she admits that her devotion to the Balance grew from having once been powerless and deciding never to be so again. For a few pages, she no longer looks merely like the woman keeping the lovers apart. Stella manages vulnerability by making herself indispensable. Damien manages it by controlling outcomes. Clarissa has scaled the same instinct up into governance: fear becomes policy, then policy gets to call itself necessity. The resemblance could have made her genuinely troublesome. Instead she is soon busy being monstrous again.
Meanwhile, Hell itself offers a similar possibility and then mostly declines it. Souls power the realm. Ancient laws govern their collection. Damien argues that those laws belong to conditions long past and suspects that the surplus now benefits the people enforcing the Balance as much as the Balance itself. That is enough to make the Council’s righteousness wobble, but not enough to build a fully persuasive infernal politics. The rules tighten when Stella must be threatened and loosen when the lovers need a way through. Hell, for all its paperwork, remains less a state than a pressure system.
In the final act, Clarissa abducts Stella and the Council sentences her soul to destruction. Damien answers in the language he has trusted from the beginning: substitution. His life for hers. He offers his own soul, the Council accepts, and Clarissa destroys it. The scene lands because the gesture is loving and because, by then, it should also look familiar. Damien has spent the novel telling Stella that disappearing for the people she loves is not the same thing as living. Faced with her death, he cannot follow his own advice. Martyrdom is not his transformation. It is his relapse.
Then the supposedly irreversible becomes surprisingly negotiable. Agatha reveals that she is more than the human housekeeper she appeared to be and knows what Stella can do. A soul may be divided. Agatha can remain behind to handle Clarissa and Hell. The Fringe can collapse while Stella, Damien and Archie escape to Earth. The book has seeded Agatha’s excessive knowledge, so none of this arrives from nowhere, but several locked doors swing open at once. What looked irreversible turns out to have an infernal customer-service desk.
Rather than accept Damien’s sacrifice as the last word, Stella rejects the solution he chose for her. She divides her own soul and shares it with him, telling Damien that she has done what he did except that her version keeps both of them alive. That distinction is the ending’s real success. All book long, one character has tried to love by becoming expendable and the other has rushed in to stop it. Stella finally changes the terms. The spell-work is convenient. What she does with it is not. Survival together asks something their grand gestures never did: remaining.
Once Stella divides the soul, its earlier meanings snap into a useful sequence. She first offers it as payment for Grace. Hell calls it collateral and uses souls as fuel. Clarissa turns Stella’s into leverage. Damien finally offers his own as replacement currency. Stella alone refuses the arithmetic in which somebody must be spent. The metaphor grows more coherent as the cosmology grows less so.
Perhaps that is why the hospital lingers longer than the Council chamber. There is nothing supernatural about believing that love can be measured by how little of yourself remains afterward. Stella’s years with Grace have narrowed her life, but the novel does not insult that devotion by pretending it was merely damage. Care can exhaust precisely because it matters. Resentment, terror and fierce loyalty can occupy the same tired body without canceling one another. The problem begins when Stella can no longer imagine being worth keeping except as the person who keeps everyone else afloat. Damien, magnificently overdressed, has built the same trap.
Of the nearby books, Amber V. Nicole’s “The Book of Azrael” offers the clearest thematic rhyme: another supernatural romance begins with a woman willing to surrender herself to save a dying sister. Laura Thalassa’s “Rhapsodic” similarly lets a supernatural debt conceal a romantic history longer than its heroine first understands. Heat becomes more particular when the scale shrinks. A repaired garden, a remembered preference, a cat brought along to damnation, smoke rearranged into warmth: her underworld works best when eternity is embarrassed by domestic detail.
Underneath all that pleasure is the reason I stop at 79/100, or 3/5 stars. Heat understands the lovers more completely than the machinery built to threaten them. The prose sometimes says twice what a scene has already managed once; the middle revisits the same approach-and-retreat rhythm; Damien’s ugliest violence is often directed at people easy to despise; Clarissa simplifies just as she threatens to become inconveniently interesting; Hell discovers flexibility at useful moments. None of those weaknesses cancels the care with which Stella and Damien have been made mirrors. They do explain why the romance feels sturdier than the world supposedly capable of destroying it.
Love gets the last revision. Stella begins by offering her whole soul so Grace can live. Damien later offers his whole soul so Stella can live. Either gesture, taken alone, would leave the novel trapped inside the beautiful stupidity of martyrdom. Stella’s answer is less grand and more difficult: no one has to vanish. For all its devils, bargains, ruined estates and infernal bookkeeping, “Realm of the Wicked” ends with its best idea reduced to something almost modest – not a soul purified, conquered or redeemed, but one divided carefully enough that two people can carry it home.
Torri Heat’s “Realm of the Wicked” is at its best when infernal bureaucracy, gothic menace, caregiving fatigue, possessive desire, cats, roses, and household routine all collide in the same strange romance
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 3rd, 2026
Devils arrive rather late to “Realm of the Wicked.” Before Torri Heat sends one to Stella Whittier’s riverside bench, she has established the more ordinary disciplines by which a person can disappear. Stella’s younger sister, Grace, is dying; their parents are already dead. For a decade Stella has been guardian, breadwinner, advocate, nurse and keeper of whatever terror Grace cannot be expected to carry. When a doctor recommends hospice, Stella reaches instinctively for one more treatment, one more chance, one more thing she can do. She eventually admits that the decision belongs to Grace, but surrender does not come naturally to someone who has spent years making herself useful enough to hold disaster off. By the time Stella offers the Devil her soul for her sister’s life, the literal bargain feels less like a rupture than an escalation. She has been giving herself away in installments for years.
Even before Damien names a price, Stella has learned to understand love as expenditure. College plans can change. Grief can wait. Sleep can wait. Fear can certainly wait if Grace is watching. She smiles because Grace needs a smile and keeps functioning because somebody has to. Damien merely introduces infernal bookkeeping to a ledger Stella already keeps. His resemblance to Stella is not especially flattering to either of them. She gives herself away to make other people safe; he has spent an eternity deciding, usually without consultation, who needs saving and what the rescue should cost.
Most Faustian tales depend on fine print. Heat’s comes in excellent tailoring. Stella tells a mysterious stranger she would give anything to save Grace; he takes “anything” with professional literalism. Grace’s scans clear. Damien appears in Stella’s bedroom to collect. He is the Devil, though “Devil” proves closer to an office than a species, and he removes Stella to the Fringe, a realm between Earth and Hell. Long-term residents ordinarily surrender their souls into stasis, and those souls help power Hell. Damien was supposed to take Stella’s. Instead he keeps it intact, which gives Hell’s Council both an administrative problem and, in Clarissa, a vindictive one.
Enter the Fringe’s gothic mansion, where dread keeps tripping over domestic routine. Enchanted corridors, hungry shadows, a Hellhound and a rearranging forest share space with books, meals, music, gardening, the formidable Agatha and Stella’s enormous Maine Coon, Archie. Hell may run on souls, but the Fringe runs suspiciously often on dinner. Damien can threaten apocalyptic violence and then worry that Stella is cold. His smoke, first a sign of anger, later settles around her shoulders like a blanket. The contrast does more than make him charming. The longer Stella stays, the less the estate feels like the architecture of punishment and the more it resembles a home nobody involved knows how to admit they want. Eternity keeps being interrupted by household detail.
The sharper joke is that Damien understands Stella before Stella understands Damien. He tells her she has spent so long saving other people that she has forgotten herself. Stella immediately asks who saved him. He retreats behind the Devil’s desk, glasses and all. He never needed saving, he says, which is how we know that he did. Stella surrendered the future she imagined in order to raise Grace; Damien, once human, surrendered his own soul in an earlier act of familial sacrifice and ended up in his infernal post. Each can spot the other’s martyr complex across a room and miss his or her own at point-blank range. For two people so preoccupied with rescue, they are wonderfully bad at receiving it.
Rather than ask syntax to carry the seduction, Heat writes for pulse. Her prose is colloquial, profane, fragment-friendly and emotionally declarative. Stella’s questions chase one another when anxiety takes over; repetition marks the moment attraction or fear outruns composure. Damien’s chapters swell into something more florid and obsessive, though the ancient Devil thinks and swears with striking modernity. Heat wants very little distance between feeling and reader. Sometimes that directness is exactly right; sometimes the scene has already delivered the emotion before the narration circles back to make sure it arrived. The plot is compressed; the feelings occasionally secure rent control.
If the figurative language tends toward familiar cracks, walls, darkness and people threatening to shatter, the objects are better behaved. Yellow clothing, smoke, ledgers and roses accrue meaning without requiring a speech. Damien’s thornless roses preserve a memory of his mother. The ledgers reduce destiny to something unnervingly close to office work. Yellow becomes Stella’s ordinary warmth inside the Fringe’s theatrical gloom. Heat is often subtler with a sweater than with a declaration of eternal devotion, which is a compliment to the sweater and a warning to the declaration.
Perhaps the book’s best formal decision is simply to keep Damien out of our heads at first. Stella owns the opening five chapters, so the bargain, Grace’s cure and Damien’s arrival retain their menace. Only after he has taken Stella to the Fringe does his first-person narration begin. From there his chapters appear less to repeat events than to disturb Stella’s version of them. Three retrospective movements – eight years ago, five years ago, two years ago – reach into a history she thought was hers alone and quietly leave his fingerprints on it.
Across those flashbacks, fascination becomes protection, protection becomes surveillance, and surveillance becomes obsession. Damien first notices Stella after her parents’ deaths because he sees her hide her own grief for Grace. He later intervenes against an assailant and an exploitative landlord. Then the ledger says Stella should die in a car accident, so Damien lets himself into her apartment and sabotages enough of her morning routine to make her leave late. Coffee machine, hot water, charger: providence by household nuisance. It is funny, intimate and faintly horrifying, eternal devotion expressed through a broken coffee maker. The clever part is the timing. Each new trespass appears only after the last one has begun to look, from inside the romance, rather like kindness.
Perfect attention is the fantasy and the problem. Damien remembers Stella’s dislikes, abandoned plans, favorite color, even how old she was when she learned to ride a bicycle. For Stella, who has spent years doing the noticing for everyone else, such knowledge lands with enormous force. Somebody has seen the labor people around her simply accepted. Yet he knows these things because he watched when she did not know she was being watched. The same fact produces the comfort and the alarm. Heat does not always press hard enough on that contradiction, but the romance is more interesting whenever she leaves it exposed.
At the Council dinner, Stella hears the contradiction in Damien’s own language. Clarissa demands her soul; Damien answers that because he collected Stella, the soul is his to keep, destroy or return as he chooses. He means to shield her. Stella still hears two powerful beings discussing her as property. For a moment villain and lover share a grammar, and she wonders whether either sees a woman or merely leverage. Damien’s intention is not trivial, but neither is Stella’s recoil. Earlier, Stella had to accept that Grace’s body and end-of-life choices belonged to Grace. Damien is slower to learn the corresponding lesson about Stella.
Dark romance does not owe us exemplary courtship; exemplary courtship would rather spoil the adjective. Heat plainly knows the appeal of danger, possession and the fantasy of surrender, and her later erotic scenes give Stella considerably more room to choose, ask and pursue than the premise might suggest. The real strain lies elsewhere. Damien can respect an erotic yes while still making enormous decisions about Stella’s life without one. She repeatedly pushes against that habit. The novel lets the argument continue, though its great fondness for Damien occasionally files down the teeth before they have quite finished biting.
If anyone might have made that bite sharper, it is Clarissa. Late in the novel she admits that her devotion to the Balance grew from having once been powerless and deciding never to be so again. For a few pages, she no longer looks merely like the woman keeping the lovers apart. Stella manages vulnerability by making herself indispensable. Damien manages it by controlling outcomes. Clarissa has scaled the same instinct up into governance: fear becomes policy, then policy gets to call itself necessity. The resemblance could have made her genuinely troublesome. Instead she is soon busy being monstrous again.
Meanwhile, Hell itself offers a similar possibility and then mostly declines it. Souls power the realm. Ancient laws govern their collection. Damien argues that those laws belong to conditions long past and suspects that the surplus now benefits the people enforcing the Balance as much as the Balance itself. That is enough to make the Council’s righteousness wobble, but not enough to build a fully persuasive infernal politics. The rules tighten when Stella must be threatened and loosen when the lovers need a way through. Hell, for all its paperwork, remains less a state than a pressure system.
In the final act, Clarissa abducts Stella and the Council sentences her soul to destruction. Damien answers in the language he has trusted from the beginning: substitution. His life for hers. He offers his own soul, the Council accepts, and Clarissa destroys it. The scene lands because the gesture is loving and because, by then, it should also look familiar. Damien has spent the novel telling Stella that disappearing for the people she loves is not the same thing as living. Faced with her death, he cannot follow his own advice. Martyrdom is not his transformation. It is his relapse.
Then the supposedly irreversible becomes surprisingly negotiable. Agatha reveals that she is more than the human housekeeper she appeared to be and knows what Stella can do. A soul may be divided. Agatha can remain behind to handle Clarissa and Hell. The Fringe can collapse while Stella, Damien and Archie escape to Earth. The book has seeded Agatha’s excessive knowledge, so none of this arrives from nowhere, but several locked doors swing open at once. What looked irreversible turns out to have an infernal customer-service desk.
Rather than accept Damien’s sacrifice as the last word, Stella rejects the solution he chose for her. She divides her own soul and shares it with him, telling Damien that she has done what he did except that her version keeps both of them alive. That distinction is the ending’s real success. All book long, one character has tried to love by becoming expendable and the other has rushed in to stop it. Stella finally changes the terms. The spell-work is convenient. What she does with it is not. Survival together asks something their grand gestures never did: remaining.
Once Stella divides the soul, its earlier meanings snap into a useful sequence. She first offers it as payment for Grace. Hell calls it collateral and uses souls as fuel. Clarissa turns Stella’s into leverage. Damien finally offers his own as replacement currency. Stella alone refuses the arithmetic in which somebody must be spent. The metaphor grows more coherent as the cosmology grows less so.
Perhaps that is why the hospital lingers longer than the Council chamber. There is nothing supernatural about believing that love can be measured by how little of yourself remains afterward. Stella’s years with Grace have narrowed her life, but the novel does not insult that devotion by pretending it was merely damage. Care can exhaust precisely because it matters. Resentment, terror and fierce loyalty can occupy the same tired body without canceling one another. The problem begins when Stella can no longer imagine being worth keeping except as the person who keeps everyone else afloat. Damien, magnificently overdressed, has built the same trap.
Of the nearby books, Amber V. Nicole’s “The Book of Azrael” offers the clearest thematic rhyme: another supernatural romance begins with a woman willing to surrender herself to save a dying sister. Laura Thalassa’s “Rhapsodic” similarly lets a supernatural debt conceal a romantic history longer than its heroine first understands. Heat becomes more particular when the scale shrinks. A repaired garden, a remembered preference, a cat brought along to damnation, smoke rearranged into warmth: her underworld works best when eternity is embarrassed by domestic detail.
Underneath all that pleasure is the reason I stop at 79/100, or 3/5 stars. Heat understands the lovers more completely than the machinery built to threaten them. The prose sometimes says twice what a scene has already managed once; the middle revisits the same approach-and-retreat rhythm; Damien’s ugliest violence is often directed at people easy to despise; Clarissa simplifies just as she threatens to become inconveniently interesting; Hell discovers flexibility at useful moments. None of those weaknesses cancels the care with which Stella and Damien have been made mirrors. They do explain why the romance feels sturdier than the world supposedly capable of destroying it.
Love gets the last revision. Stella begins by offering her whole soul so Grace can live. Damien later offers his whole soul so Stella can live. Either gesture, taken alone, would leave the novel trapped inside the beautiful stupidity of martyrdom. Stella’s answer is less grand and more difficult: no one has to vanish. For all its devils, bargains, ruined estates and infernal bookkeeping, “Realm of the Wicked” ends with its best idea reduced to something almost modest – not a soul purified, conquered or redeemed, but one divided carefully enough that two people can carry it home.
September 15, 2026
What could possibly go wrong when you make a deal with the devil?
Yearning. That's what happens. He yearns for her, and you can't help but fall in love with them more with every page.
Completely biased opinion, obviously. But Torri nails the hopeless romantic every time. Damien, a gruff, no-nonsense devil, switches up after thousands of years alone. I love how we get to explore a fresh take on the afterlife — the Fringe.
The humour has me in tears. Stella held nothing back, and you watch Damien match her blow for blow.
If you crave darkness but need laughter and light. This is definitely the book to dip your toes into. A refreshing twist on the tale as old as time.
Yearning. That's what happens. He yearns for her, and you can't help but fall in love with them more with every page.
Completely biased opinion, obviously. But Torri nails the hopeless romantic every time. Damien, a gruff, no-nonsense devil, switches up after thousands of years alone. I love how we get to explore a fresh take on the afterlife — the Fringe.
The humour has me in tears. Stella held nothing back, and you watch Damien match her blow for blow.
If you crave darkness but need laughter and light. This is definitely the book to dip your toes into. A refreshing twist on the tale as old as time.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Stella is a great big sister. Damien is her savior. One deal changes everything.
"The frenemy thing only works if you both hate each other, and apparently, you only bestow an eternity of damnation on those you care for."
The way that Damien looked at Stella had my heart and soul aching with desire and love. I love that what Stella and Damien shared went deeper than attraction. It is something that only soulmates share.
"Her siren call was strong."
OMG. I love this book so much. This book will stay with you long after you have finished it. That is if you don't do a re-read. I know I will be re-reading this book. I always knew Torri is an amazing writer, but she proves with this book that she is an amazing storyteller as well. My soul is aching. Damien is the Demon Book Boyfriend that I crave!
"I'll protect you. I'll always protect you. Whether you want me to or not."
"The frenemy thing only works if you both hate each other, and apparently, you only bestow an eternity of damnation on those you care for."
The way that Damien looked at Stella had my heart and soul aching with desire and love. I love that what Stella and Damien shared went deeper than attraction. It is something that only soulmates share.
"Her siren call was strong."
OMG. I love this book so much. This book will stay with you long after you have finished it. That is if you don't do a re-read. I know I will be re-reading this book. I always knew Torri is an amazing writer, but she proves with this book that she is an amazing storyteller as well. My soul is aching. Damien is the Demon Book Boyfriend that I crave!
"I'll protect you. I'll always protect you. Whether you want me to or not."
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Three and a half
If you could save your sister would you be prepared to sell your soul ?.Stella will do anything for her sister Grace but the doctors say that there is nothing that will help. A chance encounter with a man sees Stella unwittingly making that choice and before you know it Stella literally is in Hell !
I saw this touted as romantasy and have to say to me this is more paranormal romance possibly even urban romance. It certainly doesn't have a strong fantasy feel so no Fae, Dragons or Orcs here although some characters are pretty Demonic I guess.
The story is pretty straightforward really with Stella trying to understand just why Damian chose her. There's not a lot of action and essentially it's about keeping the balance between life and death with a female demon determined to keep Damian in line . I found it easy to read, fairly light really and if you fancy a palette cleanser, something to just slip into then this book with its happy ending will certainly fit the bill.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley
If you could save your sister would you be prepared to sell your soul ?.Stella will do anything for her sister Grace but the doctors say that there is nothing that will help. A chance encounter with a man sees Stella unwittingly making that choice and before you know it Stella literally is in Hell !
I saw this touted as romantasy and have to say to me this is more paranormal romance possibly even urban romance. It certainly doesn't have a strong fantasy feel so no Fae, Dragons or Orcs here although some characters are pretty Demonic I guess.
The story is pretty straightforward really with Stella trying to understand just why Damian chose her. There's not a lot of action and essentially it's about keeping the balance between life and death with a female demon determined to keep Damian in line . I found it easy to read, fairly light really and if you fancy a palette cleanser, something to just slip into then this book with its happy ending will certainly fit the bill.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley
September 12, 2026
Stella never intended to make a deal with the devil. She just wanted to save her younger sister Grace, who is terminally ill. Unfortunately, a conversation with a seemingly random stranger comes with more strings attached than Stella realises, and before long Damien, Hell’s gatekeeper, arrives to collect the debt she owes him – her soul! Cue Stella being transported to the Fringe, a sort of limbo where Damien lives on a gothic estate. Naturally, she insists on bringing her cat because apparently being kidnapped by the devil is no reason to abandon the important things in life like her fur baby
Damien was probably my favourite surprise. For a demon, he was surprisingly likeable, with an underlying loneliness that gave him more depth than expected. His obsession with Stella was less evil overlord plotting her downfall and more slightly intense supernatural protector who really needs to work on his communication skills. The relationship between them was the real draw for me. Stella doesn’t trust Damien or the situation she’s found herself in, and she certainly doesn’t make things easy for him. Their banter was wickedly delicious and entertaining, with Stella refusing to give him an inch. He may be the powerful gatekeeper of Hell, but she’s not remotely impressed by the job title. I especially loved the way the book portrayed the demon world. Rather than the usual fire, brimstone and general unpleasantness, it felt more like an extremely exclusive albeit extremely dangerous elite social club, complete with a demon council full of power plays, secrets and hidden agendas and I couldn’t help but imagine them as characters from one of those over-the-top eighties soaps like Dynasty - all shoulder pads and backstabbing. There was a definite glamour and decadence to it all, which made the world-building feel refreshingly different. Of course, that didn’t make them any less dangerous, and they were still determined to get their hands on Stella’s soul. While the pacing did wobble a little at times with a few slower sections, I was having so much fun with this book that it honestly didn’t bother me too much because there was enough going on to keep me invested in the blossoming romance.
If you like your heroes to be less dark and more of a lighter shade of grey, your heroines feisty and determined to do the right thing, and your version of Hell a little more unusual and refreshing, then I definitely recommend Realm of the Wicked.
Damien was probably my favourite surprise. For a demon, he was surprisingly likeable, with an underlying loneliness that gave him more depth than expected. His obsession with Stella was less evil overlord plotting her downfall and more slightly intense supernatural protector who really needs to work on his communication skills. The relationship between them was the real draw for me. Stella doesn’t trust Damien or the situation she’s found herself in, and she certainly doesn’t make things easy for him. Their banter was wickedly delicious and entertaining, with Stella refusing to give him an inch. He may be the powerful gatekeeper of Hell, but she’s not remotely impressed by the job title. I especially loved the way the book portrayed the demon world. Rather than the usual fire, brimstone and general unpleasantness, it felt more like an extremely exclusive albeit extremely dangerous elite social club, complete with a demon council full of power plays, secrets and hidden agendas and I couldn’t help but imagine them as characters from one of those over-the-top eighties soaps like Dynasty - all shoulder pads and backstabbing. There was a definite glamour and decadence to it all, which made the world-building feel refreshingly different. Of course, that didn’t make them any less dangerous, and they were still determined to get their hands on Stella’s soul. While the pacing did wobble a little at times with a few slower sections, I was having so much fun with this book that it honestly didn’t bother me too much because there was enough going on to keep me invested in the blossoming romance.
If you like your heroes to be less dark and more of a lighter shade of grey, your heroines feisty and determined to do the right thing, and your version of Hell a little more unusual and refreshing, then I definitely recommend Realm of the Wicked.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
She begs anyone who will listen to save her dying sister. Unfortunately for Stella, the Devil is listening. And when you make a deal with the Devil, eventually he shows up to collect.
That premise alone was enough to get me into Realm of the Wicked, and for the most part, this was a really fun dark romantasy.
Stella's motivation is what worked for me immediately. She isn't chasing power, immortality, or some grand destiny. Her younger sister Grace is dying, and Stella is desperate enough to offer her own soul if it means saving her. Then Damien actually answers.
And Damien is exactly the kind of character you expect when someone tells you the Devil is the love interest. Powerful, arrogant, dangerous, secretive, infuriating, and entirely too attractive for Stella's own good.
Once Stella is taken into the Fringe, a realm suspended above Hell, the book really settles into its dark gothic atmosphere. Demons, whispered secrets, political maneuvering, a ruthless Council, dangerous bargains, and an entire world where Stella has absolutely no idea whom she can trust. I particularly enjoyed that she doesn't suddenly become helpless just because she's been dropped into Damien's world. She's frightened and completely out of her depth, but she continues questioning everything around her and pushing back against him.
The relationship between Stella and Damien was probably my favorite part. There is forced proximity, forbidden attraction, plenty of tension, and a definite "I know trusting you is a terrible idea, but apparently I'm going to do it anyway" energy. The dual POV also works really well here because Damien knows considerably more than Stella does, and getting pieces of his perspective adds another layer to their relationship.
I did have some issues with the pacing. There were sections where the story slowed down more than I wanted, and occasionally the larger plot became a little muddled beneath the romance, politics, and worldbuilding. I wanted a bit more clarity and momentum in those moments, which is ultimately what kept this from being a five-star read for me.
But the things that worked, worked really well. The atmosphere is dark and decadent, the supernatural world is interesting, Stella has a reason for making the choices she does, and Damien delivers exactly the kind of morally gray, dangerously magnetic love interest this story promises.
If your romantasy preferences include deals with the Devil, demons, forced proximity, forbidden romance, morally gray men, gothic underworlds, and a heroine willing to bargain away her own soul for someone she loves, Realm of the Wicked should absolutely be on your radar.
Turns out selling your soul to the Devil may not be the dangerous part. Falling for him is.
Thank you to NetGalley and Boldwood Books for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.
That premise alone was enough to get me into Realm of the Wicked, and for the most part, this was a really fun dark romantasy.
Stella's motivation is what worked for me immediately. She isn't chasing power, immortality, or some grand destiny. Her younger sister Grace is dying, and Stella is desperate enough to offer her own soul if it means saving her. Then Damien actually answers.
And Damien is exactly the kind of character you expect when someone tells you the Devil is the love interest. Powerful, arrogant, dangerous, secretive, infuriating, and entirely too attractive for Stella's own good.
Once Stella is taken into the Fringe, a realm suspended above Hell, the book really settles into its dark gothic atmosphere. Demons, whispered secrets, political maneuvering, a ruthless Council, dangerous bargains, and an entire world where Stella has absolutely no idea whom she can trust. I particularly enjoyed that she doesn't suddenly become helpless just because she's been dropped into Damien's world. She's frightened and completely out of her depth, but she continues questioning everything around her and pushing back against him.
The relationship between Stella and Damien was probably my favorite part. There is forced proximity, forbidden attraction, plenty of tension, and a definite "I know trusting you is a terrible idea, but apparently I'm going to do it anyway" energy. The dual POV also works really well here because Damien knows considerably more than Stella does, and getting pieces of his perspective adds another layer to their relationship.
I did have some issues with the pacing. There were sections where the story slowed down more than I wanted, and occasionally the larger plot became a little muddled beneath the romance, politics, and worldbuilding. I wanted a bit more clarity and momentum in those moments, which is ultimately what kept this from being a five-star read for me.
But the things that worked, worked really well. The atmosphere is dark and decadent, the supernatural world is interesting, Stella has a reason for making the choices she does, and Damien delivers exactly the kind of morally gray, dangerously magnetic love interest this story promises.
If your romantasy preferences include deals with the Devil, demons, forced proximity, forbidden romance, morally gray men, gothic underworlds, and a heroine willing to bargain away her own soul for someone she loves, Realm of the Wicked should absolutely be on your radar.
Turns out selling your soul to the Devil may not be the dangerous part. Falling for him is.
Thank you to NetGalley and Boldwood Books for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Stella is a human who would do anything to save her terminally ill sister, Grace. Damien is the devil who offered her a deal. Her soul, for Grace's health. Stella doesn't think twice before taking the deal, and soon, the devil comes to collect. Now his, Grace must learn to survive in the Devil's world, with danger lurking at every turn.
~
I was obsessed with every aspect of this book. From beginning to end, I fell in love with the characters. The plot was very well done, and the characters were very developed. Damien was broody, and sassy at times. One of my favorite quotes was:
“Fine. Go get the damn cat. The falling-apart shirt and a cat. Why not? Most people would grab their jewelry, or their diary, but I have to go for the one woman who wants a scrap of fabric and a cat-” (Chapter 4, Page 32 Kindle version)
His internal dialogue was perfection. Stella was fiery and sweet. She never hesitated to stand up for herself, and despite leaving her family, stayed strong and resilient. I loved the semi-slow burn Stella and Damien had. I never got bored with their interactions or conversations. This was the perfect read I needed to get back into reading.
Now for my critique:
To be fully transparent, some aspects of the story felt rushed. There were a few things that got brought up once, but never got mentioned again. I think if the book would have been slightly longer, some of those details could have been brought back in! Along with that, I feel the ending was slightly rushed. I really wish this book had an epilogue that expanded on the ending some more. I will hold out hope for a bonus scene in the future!
While reading, I must say I got a big beauty and the beast vibe and I am obsessed with it.
Realm of the Wicked is a full length standalone novel full of spice. From beginning to end I stayed locked in, and never wanted this story to end. This was my first read by Torri Heat, and it most certainly wont be my last! I want to thank NetGalley and Boldwood books for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
September 14, 2026
DNF 36%
I was pretty surprised to go back and see this book had a publisher, it has a very self publish feel.
Basically it seems to just be a checklist of tropes, none of them done very well, which was disappointing because the first couple chapters were good and had me excited for the rest of the book.
Once the FMC gets to the MMCs house, the whole thing just falls apart (similar to how the house is allegedly falling apart, despite there being zero descriptions that describe anything being in disrepair other than an overgrown garden). The MMC seems to just be a bit of a dick for the sake of being a bit of a dick and checking off tropes, but again his words and behavior don’t really match with how the FMC is describing his words and behavior.
There is a cat who I spent entirely too much time worrying about because the FMC didn’t. Ma’am get your cat a litter box and some water and food. What are you even doing?
Then there is plenty of one of my biggest writing peeves in this genre: “he did xyz behavior, just like he always does.” Ma’am you have had quite literally 9 minutes of interaction total with this man. There is no “always.” You do not have a sample from which to draw this “always” conclusion.
I quit at about the third time the MMC scolded the FMC for the haunted house trying to kill(?) her. She asks him to give her a list of things she needs to avoid in the house so as not to die, and he basically tells her no, everything will kill her, she just needs to be aware of that and not get dead. Oh. Cool. Alright, that behavior makes perfect sense from someone who is allegedly obsessed with her and wants to keep her safe. Also being stuck in a house with a guy and his housekeeper, with nothing to do but gardening chores and getting dressed up for dinner with the same two people *does* sound like my idea of hell, regardless of how good looking he is.
I was pretty surprised to go back and see this book had a publisher, it has a very self publish feel.
Basically it seems to just be a checklist of tropes, none of them done very well, which was disappointing because the first couple chapters were good and had me excited for the rest of the book.
Once the FMC gets to the MMCs house, the whole thing just falls apart (similar to how the house is allegedly falling apart, despite there being zero descriptions that describe anything being in disrepair other than an overgrown garden). The MMC seems to just be a bit of a dick for the sake of being a bit of a dick and checking off tropes, but again his words and behavior don’t really match with how the FMC is describing his words and behavior.
There is a cat who I spent entirely too much time worrying about because the FMC didn’t. Ma’am get your cat a litter box and some water and food. What are you even doing?
Then there is plenty of one of my biggest writing peeves in this genre: “he did xyz behavior, just like he always does.” Ma’am you have had quite literally 9 minutes of interaction total with this man. There is no “always.” You do not have a sample from which to draw this “always” conclusion.
I quit at about the third time the MMC scolded the FMC for the haunted house trying to kill(?) her. She asks him to give her a list of things she needs to avoid in the house so as not to die, and he basically tells her no, everything will kill her, she just needs to be aware of that and not get dead. Oh. Cool. Alright, that behavior makes perfect sense from someone who is allegedly obsessed with her and wants to keep her safe. Also being stuck in a house with a guy and his housekeeper, with nothing to do but gardening chores and getting dressed up for dinner with the same two people *does* sound like my idea of hell, regardless of how good looking he is.
September 17, 2026
A Devil obsessed with a human? Yeah, there was no way I was passing this one up. The gorgeous cover definitely caught my attention, but the premise was what really sold me. I ended up abandoning my current read and devouring this in one day because I needed to know what was going to happen.
Stella makes a deal with Damien, the Devil himself, to save her terminally ill younger sister Grace. In exchange for Grace’s health, Stella gives him her soul. But when Damien comes to collect, Stella finds herself pulled into the Fringe, his dangerous world.
I really loved Stella and Damien together. Their banter was probably one of my favorite parts, and Damien was way too sassy for someone who is literally the Devil. Stella was also such a great character. She was incredibly selfless when it came to Grace and was so used to putting everyone else first that she had forgotten about her own wants and needs.
And Damien? A man obsessed. He had been watching over Stella and would do just about anything for her, and I was completely here for it. You could not convince me that he wasn’t supposed to end up in her orbit.
I also really enjoyed the Fringe and got some serious Beauty and the Beast vibes from the story. Watching Stella and Damien slowly give in to their feelings while everything around them seemed determined to keep them apart was so much fun.
I did think some parts were rushed, though. There were a few things that were introduced and then never really mentioned again, and I think the story would have benefited from being a little longer. The ending especially felt rushed, and I really wish we had gotten an epilogue. I wanted to see Stella and Damien months or even years later, still completely obsessed with each other.
Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I stayed locked in from beginning to end, and it was exactly the kind of book I needed to get excited about reading again.
My first Torri Heat book, but definitely not my last.
Stella makes a deal with Damien, the Devil himself, to save her terminally ill younger sister Grace. In exchange for Grace’s health, Stella gives him her soul. But when Damien comes to collect, Stella finds herself pulled into the Fringe, his dangerous world.
I really loved Stella and Damien together. Their banter was probably one of my favorite parts, and Damien was way too sassy for someone who is literally the Devil. Stella was also such a great character. She was incredibly selfless when it came to Grace and was so used to putting everyone else first that she had forgotten about her own wants and needs.
And Damien? A man obsessed. He had been watching over Stella and would do just about anything for her, and I was completely here for it. You could not convince me that he wasn’t supposed to end up in her orbit.
I also really enjoyed the Fringe and got some serious Beauty and the Beast vibes from the story. Watching Stella and Damien slowly give in to their feelings while everything around them seemed determined to keep them apart was so much fun.
I did think some parts were rushed, though. There were a few things that were introduced and then never really mentioned again, and I think the story would have benefited from being a little longer. The ending especially felt rushed, and I really wish we had gotten an epilogue. I wanted to see Stella and Damien months or even years later, still completely obsessed with each other.
Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I stayed locked in from beginning to end, and it was exactly the kind of book I needed to get excited about reading again.
My first Torri Heat book, but definitely not my last.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This started well. I liked the pacing and how quickly we got into the story. There wasn’t a ton of waiting around for things to happen, and I liked the premise of Stella making a deal with Damien and then slowly getting introduced to his world. I especially liked the Fringe and learning about the dynamics there and the things she had to avoid.
But I never really emotionally connected to the characters.
From the cover and blurb, I thought this was going to be much more of a dark romance, and I wouldn’t personally categorize it that way. Damien is supposed to be completely obsessed with Stella, but I kept wondering… why? She’s a perfectly likable character, but I never saw what made her her to him. Why was she different from everybody else? I needed more there to really buy into his level of obsession.
And for someone who’s supposed to be the Devil, Damien wasn’t particularly dark or morally questionable. 🫤 (which they kinda explained why)
There was some sexual tension, but I wasn’t sitting there desperate for these two to finally get together.
Then toward the end, the pacing that I’d initially liked started feeling too fast. Things were wrapping up and I kept thinking, wait… did we skip something? There were places where I wanted the story to slow down and fill in some of the gaps because it started to feel like we were rushing past things that needed a little more explanation.
Ultimately, three stars. I enjoyed it for what it was. I liked the premise and parts of the world, and I had a perfectly good time reading it. If someone asked me if they should read it, I’d say, “Sure.” 😂
I just wouldn’t go into it expecting a particularly dark romance, a super sexy romance, or something that’s going to put you through an emotional roller coaster. It was good. I liked it. I just didn’t feel much beyond that
But I never really emotionally connected to the characters.
From the cover and blurb, I thought this was going to be much more of a dark romance, and I wouldn’t personally categorize it that way. Damien is supposed to be completely obsessed with Stella, but I kept wondering… why? She’s a perfectly likable character, but I never saw what made her her to him. Why was she different from everybody else? I needed more there to really buy into his level of obsession.
And for someone who’s supposed to be the Devil, Damien wasn’t particularly dark or morally questionable. 🫤 (which they kinda explained why)
There was some sexual tension, but I wasn’t sitting there desperate for these two to finally get together.
Then toward the end, the pacing that I’d initially liked started feeling too fast. Things were wrapping up and I kept thinking, wait… did we skip something? There were places where I wanted the story to slow down and fill in some of the gaps because it started to feel like we were rushing past things that needed a little more explanation.
Ultimately, three stars. I enjoyed it for what it was. I liked the premise and parts of the world, and I had a perfectly good time reading it. If someone asked me if they should read it, I’d say, “Sure.” 😂
I just wouldn’t go into it expecting a particularly dark romance, a super sexy romance, or something that’s going to put you through an emotional roller coaster. It was good. I liked it. I just didn’t feel much beyond that
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Netgalley Review
The writing was engaging, emotional and intense. I was hooked from the beginning right through to the end. There were a lot of deep emotions that ran throughout the book and I was eager to see how it would all pan out.
The chapters were fairly long which meant that you got a good chunk of the story before moving on. Every so often the chapters would swap character points of view. To make it clear whose point of view you were reading from, each chapter had the character's name as the title. I loved reading the story from both of the main characters' points of view. As the reader we were privy to what each character was thinking ahead of them which made it more intense.
There was an interesting flow to the story created by the swapping of points of view. It was a smooth transition though and this technique made the story feel more rounded.
There was a good pace to the book. Whilst Damien was trying to sort everything out in the background there were other things happening that moved us through the story well.
The characters were excellent. I enjoyed reading about both of the main characters, especially how they would do anything for each other. Whilst it seemed a relatively short time for Stella, it had obviously been a long time in the making for Damien, so it was interesting seeing how it all finally came together.
Lastly the settings. There were some excellent descriptions throughout the book that really brought the story to life and gave the reader something extra to focus on.
Overall an emotional and intense read. The perfect read for any Romantasy fan!
The writing was engaging, emotional and intense. I was hooked from the beginning right through to the end. There were a lot of deep emotions that ran throughout the book and I was eager to see how it would all pan out.
The chapters were fairly long which meant that you got a good chunk of the story before moving on. Every so often the chapters would swap character points of view. To make it clear whose point of view you were reading from, each chapter had the character's name as the title. I loved reading the story from both of the main characters' points of view. As the reader we were privy to what each character was thinking ahead of them which made it more intense.
There was an interesting flow to the story created by the swapping of points of view. It was a smooth transition though and this technique made the story feel more rounded.
There was a good pace to the book. Whilst Damien was trying to sort everything out in the background there were other things happening that moved us through the story well.
The characters were excellent. I enjoyed reading about both of the main characters, especially how they would do anything for each other. Whilst it seemed a relatively short time for Stella, it had obviously been a long time in the making for Damien, so it was interesting seeing how it all finally came together.
Lastly the settings. There were some excellent descriptions throughout the book that really brought the story to life and gave the reader something extra to focus on.
Overall an emotional and intense read. The perfect read for any Romantasy fan!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Wow this is a amazing read that is intense and dark. This has plot twists and on the edge of your seat chapters. This is a long book but it gives you the whole story. I enjoyed this fantasy romance. Stella’s wishes to saved her sister and will do everything to save her tell the devil himself apparels and offer her a wish she can't refuse.
All she ever wanted was to keep her little sister safe.
All he ever wanted was her.
When Stella’s beloved younger sister Grace falls ill and is given just months to live, she will do anything in her power to save her.
But she never expected the Devil to answer her prayer.
That night, Damien steps from the shadows of Stella’s bedroom, devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful, ready to collect the soul she was desperate enough to promise in exchange for her sister’s life.
Every day in Damien’s estate brings new dangers, and a dangerously intoxicating kind of protection. Charming, arrogant and infuriatingly magnetic, Damien insists he can keep her safe… and maybe even save her soul.
Stella knows better than to trust him. He’s dangerous, and his kingdom is built on deception. But worse than the lies is the pull between them – dark, irresistible and impossible to ignore.
And in the realm of the wicked, the only thing deadlier than losing your soul is losing your heart…
Refused to let go.”
All she ever wanted was to keep her little sister safe.
All he ever wanted was her.
When Stella’s beloved younger sister Grace falls ill and is given just months to live, she will do anything in her power to save her.
But she never expected the Devil to answer her prayer.
That night, Damien steps from the shadows of Stella’s bedroom, devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful, ready to collect the soul she was desperate enough to promise in exchange for her sister’s life.
Every day in Damien’s estate brings new dangers, and a dangerously intoxicating kind of protection. Charming, arrogant and infuriatingly magnetic, Damien insists he can keep her safe… and maybe even save her soul.
Stella knows better than to trust him. He’s dangerous, and his kingdom is built on deception. But worse than the lies is the pull between them – dark, irresistible and impossible to ignore.
And in the realm of the wicked, the only thing deadlier than losing your soul is losing your heart…
Refused to let go.”
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
What's the worst that can happen when you make a deal with a devil? That is the premise of this dark romantasy. I always love reading about anything regarding devil deals and the underworld with a paranormal twist and Realm of the Wicked checks off all my boxes. The book cover captures the magical essence of the story while inviting readers to a grim, paranormal adventure.
In this story we have the selfless Stella who crosses paths with Damien who is the Devil. This dynamic feels very much like Beauty and the Beast with the way their relationship develops. I loved the dual POV as it gives readers perspective on Damien who's past is complex. Agatha is also an entertaining side character and I would love to hear more about her backstory. The antagonists are humourous and add stakes to the plot. The pacing of this book is good and it kept me hooked from beginning to end.
If you enjoy dark fantasy with forbidden love, demons, he falls first, and more, Realm of the Wicked is the book for your TBR lists.
Thank you to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.
In this story we have the selfless Stella who crosses paths with Damien who is the Devil. This dynamic feels very much like Beauty and the Beast with the way their relationship develops. I loved the dual POV as it gives readers perspective on Damien who's past is complex. Agatha is also an entertaining side character and I would love to hear more about her backstory. The antagonists are humourous and add stakes to the plot. The pacing of this book is good and it kept me hooked from beginning to end.
If you enjoy dark fantasy with forbidden love, demons, he falls first, and more, Realm of the Wicked is the book for your TBR lists.
Thank you to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Realm of the Wicked was such a good romantasy! The whole idea of making a desperate deal with the Devil and being dragged into a dangerous realm suspended above Hell immediately had me intrigued. I loved the gothic atmosphere, demons, secrets and darker paranormal elements, and the world of the Fringe had exactly the kind of wicked, seductive vibe I wanted from this story.
And Damien… 😮💨🖤 Charming, arrogant, dangerous and morally questionable? Obviously I was going to love him. I really enjoyed the chemistry between him and Stella. Their attraction mixed with all the danger and deception made this such an easy book to get swept up in, and I especially loved how fiercely Stella was driven by her love for her sister.
This was a really enjoyable four star read for me. It was spicy, atmospheric and packed with paranormal goodness, with enough romance and tension to keep me hooked. It wasn’t a five star read, but I still had such a good time reading it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who loves romantasy, dangerous demons and morally grey men. 🖤🥀
Thank you to the author and Boldwood Books for this ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
And Damien… 😮💨🖤 Charming, arrogant, dangerous and morally questionable? Obviously I was going to love him. I really enjoyed the chemistry between him and Stella. Their attraction mixed with all the danger and deception made this such an easy book to get swept up in, and I especially loved how fiercely Stella was driven by her love for her sister.
This was a really enjoyable four star read for me. It was spicy, atmospheric and packed with paranormal goodness, with enough romance and tension to keep me hooked. It wasn’t a five star read, but I still had such a good time reading it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who loves romantasy, dangerous demons and morally grey men. 🖤🥀
Thank you to the author and Boldwood Books for this ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I really wanted to love this book based on the description and the cover. While I didn't love it, I didn't hate it.
Stella is the sole caretaker of her sick sister. When treatments aren't working and Stella is most desperate, the devil sweeps in to claim her soul in exchange for her sisters health. Stella, thinking this is just some random guy, agrees that she would give "anything" to save her sister.
Boom! Sister is cured, and the devil comes to collect his due. Did you know that the devil isn't actually evil, but essentially a ferry man to deliver souls to hell to meet quotas? And that a life of self sacrifice earns you a one way ticket to hell? Me either!
I also didn't expect the devil to live such a domestic lifestyle. Working from his home office and sharing dinners, where you MUST be dressed up, with his housekeeper.
I will say the character I found the most interesting and who I think I would devour a book about was Clarissa. I need to know why she hates Damien (oh yeah, that's the devils name) so much.
Overall, the prose was well done. I just was left with more questions than answers and didn't feel any attachment to the characters.
Thank you, Net Galley & Boxwood Books, for the opportunity to read this book.
Stella is the sole caretaker of her sick sister. When treatments aren't working and Stella is most desperate, the devil sweeps in to claim her soul in exchange for her sisters health. Stella, thinking this is just some random guy, agrees that she would give "anything" to save her sister.
Boom! Sister is cured, and the devil comes to collect his due. Did you know that the devil isn't actually evil, but essentially a ferry man to deliver souls to hell to meet quotas? And that a life of self sacrifice earns you a one way ticket to hell? Me either!
I also didn't expect the devil to live such a domestic lifestyle. Working from his home office and sharing dinners, where you MUST be dressed up, with his housekeeper.
I will say the character I found the most interesting and who I think I would devour a book about was Clarissa. I need to know why she hates Damien (oh yeah, that's the devils name) so much.
Overall, the prose was well done. I just was left with more questions than answers and didn't feel any attachment to the characters.
Thank you, Net Galley & Boxwood Books, for the opportunity to read this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 17, 2026
I read this in one and a half sittings and loved every word.
Stella would do anything to save her sister Grace from a horrible disease, including something she didn't even realize she would do:
sell her soul.
A handsome stranger on a park bench turns out to be the Devil, and after shaking hands with him, Stella has no choice but to go you-know-where. Only it's not 'exactly' Hell. It's the Fringe, a concept I absolutely loved. The fact that Stella's cat Archie pissed off the Devil was icing on the cake, because she absolutely refused to go if she couldn't take Archie with her! I also loved that the Devil (Damien, great name) has a housekeeper who gardens. Watching Stella and Damien try not to fall in love despite inevitability and obstacles (like the shadowy Nihil, the Devil's smoking hounddog, and a c-word aka Clarissa from the Council), was fun and kept me guessing how Stella also might manage to escape back to her sister, right up until the end, where Stella tricked the Fringe's 'checks and balances' system with a solution that surprised me but also didn't. Because that's what you do for love. Can't wait for the next book!
Stella would do anything to save her sister Grace from a horrible disease, including something she didn't even realize she would do:
sell her soul.
A handsome stranger on a park bench turns out to be the Devil, and after shaking hands with him, Stella has no choice but to go you-know-where. Only it's not 'exactly' Hell. It's the Fringe, a concept I absolutely loved. The fact that Stella's cat Archie pissed off the Devil was icing on the cake, because she absolutely refused to go if she couldn't take Archie with her! I also loved that the Devil (Damien, great name) has a housekeeper who gardens. Watching Stella and Damien try not to fall in love despite inevitability and obstacles (like the shadowy Nihil, the Devil's smoking hounddog, and a c-word aka Clarissa from the Council), was fun and kept me guessing how Stella also might manage to escape back to her sister, right up until the end, where Stella tricked the Fringe's 'checks and balances' system with a solution that surprised me but also didn't. Because that's what you do for love. Can't wait for the next book!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Okay, I honestly loved this book! I read it in under 2 days and I couldn’t wait to pick it back up in between. It was well paced, and though it’s technically a Dark Romantasy there’s more romance than fantasy and it was honestly refreshing. It was a true slow burn with flashbacks and dual POVs which I loved. I particularly love that the flashbacks were from Damien’s (the MMC) POV. It added another layer to the level of soul deep yearning we get in this book. And honestly the yearning was top tier and one of my favorite parts of this story. I’d give it a 2-3 spice level. Stella (the FMC) is a real woman, going through real life things and honestly the first chapter made me tear up. I felt like the author made me feel so connected to her and her sister Grace. I also felt deeply moved by the way she represented being the caregiver for someone who is ill. I felt like she gave us such a range of emotions that Stella went through caring for her sister and it was just so real, and raw. This book was so emotional, and romantic. I 100% recommend adding this to your TBR.
October 9, 2026
DNF at 25%
Is it really a dark romance if the love interest is a good guy in a bad situation? Oh no, the devil! But hes kind and gentle and sweet! Idk maybe he'd become more devilish as the story goes on but as far as I read he's just a old fashioned guy with emo ideation
The pacing was very slow. The author knows how to move a scene along, yet it took so long for anything to happen. Even by the 25% it felt like a cozy story than a supernatural romance
Stella is like 31 so it was nice to have a fmc who has a developed brain. She's fairly rational (huzzah)
But.. the devil is named DAMIEN? Who is threatened by this guy? Oh no, I sold my soul to DAMIEN. My soul is being tortured for eternity by DAMIEN. I cant take it seriously im very sorry.
I found the relationships were pretty dull honestly. They dont feel connected or invested in each other but kinda like a classmate you had in a few classes and kind of talk to every once in a while before class starts. Which sucks bc i had high hopes based on how individualized fhe characters are
Is it really a dark romance if the love interest is a good guy in a bad situation? Oh no, the devil! But hes kind and gentle and sweet! Idk maybe he'd become more devilish as the story goes on but as far as I read he's just a old fashioned guy with emo ideation
The pacing was very slow. The author knows how to move a scene along, yet it took so long for anything to happen. Even by the 25% it felt like a cozy story than a supernatural romance
Stella is like 31 so it was nice to have a fmc who has a developed brain. She's fairly rational (huzzah)
But.. the devil is named DAMIEN? Who is threatened by this guy? Oh no, I sold my soul to DAMIEN. My soul is being tortured for eternity by DAMIEN. I cant take it seriously im very sorry.
I found the relationships were pretty dull honestly. They dont feel connected or invested in each other but kinda like a classmate you had in a few classes and kind of talk to every once in a while before class starts. Which sucks bc i had high hopes based on how individualized fhe characters are
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
4.5 stars
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC! A Deal With the Devil Never Sounded So Tempting. All Stella ever wanted was to keep her sister Grace safe. When Grace falls gravely ill, Stella makes a desperate promise never expecting the Devil himself to show up and collect. Damien, devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful, shows up ready to collect. He pulls her into the Fringe, a decadent realm above Hell full of demons in silk, whispered secrets, and a ruthless Council eager to claim what she owes. Damien is everything you want in a devil: charming, arrogant, infuriatingly magnetic. Stella knows better than to trust him, but that dark, irresistible pull between them is impossible to ignore. Torri Heat's writing is a dream, and the spice is out of this world. I was hooked from the very first page. This story sinks its claws in and refuses to let go. This is an absolute must read for dark romantasy fans!
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC! A Deal With the Devil Never Sounded So Tempting. All Stella ever wanted was to keep her sister Grace safe. When Grace falls gravely ill, Stella makes a desperate promise never expecting the Devil himself to show up and collect. Damien, devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly powerful, shows up ready to collect. He pulls her into the Fringe, a decadent realm above Hell full of demons in silk, whispered secrets, and a ruthless Council eager to claim what she owes. Damien is everything you want in a devil: charming, arrogant, infuriatingly magnetic. Stella knows better than to trust him, but that dark, irresistible pull between them is impossible to ignore. Torri Heat's writing is a dream, and the spice is out of this world. I was hooked from the very first page. This story sinks its claws in and refuses to let go. This is an absolute must read for dark romantasy fans!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
⭐⭐⭐
Realm of the Wicked had a lot of the elements I typically enjoy in a dark romantasy: a gothic atmosphere, demons, soul bargains, and plenty of romantic tension. I really enjoyed the premise and the supernatural setting, and Stella's determination to save her sister gave the story some solid emotional stakes. The chemistry between Stella and Damien was also a highlight, with plenty of push-and-pull between them.
That said, I felt the world-building and character development could have been stronger. With so much happening in the supernatural world, I wanted more depth and explanation, and some aspects felt a little condensed. The relationship progression also felt somewhat quick, and a few plot developments were predictable.
Overall, this was an entertaining dark romantasy with an intriguing premise and plenty of potential, but I found myself wanting a little more depth. A solid 3-star read for me.
Realm of the Wicked had a lot of the elements I typically enjoy in a dark romantasy: a gothic atmosphere, demons, soul bargains, and plenty of romantic tension. I really enjoyed the premise and the supernatural setting, and Stella's determination to save her sister gave the story some solid emotional stakes. The chemistry between Stella and Damien was also a highlight, with plenty of push-and-pull between them.
That said, I felt the world-building and character development could have been stronger. With so much happening in the supernatural world, I wanted more depth and explanation, and some aspects felt a little condensed. The relationship progression also felt somewhat quick, and a few plot developments were predictable.
Overall, this was an entertaining dark romantasy with an intriguing premise and plenty of potential, but I found myself wanting a little more depth. A solid 3-star read for me.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I really enjoyed the storyline of this book and loved that it brought something a little different to the romantasy world! It definitely gave me Beauty and the Beast vibes—of course, if the Beast was actually the devil. 😂🔥
I thought the pacing and story development were done really well, and I genuinely enjoyed the FMC and MMC’s love story. Give me a yearning MMC who is obsessed from the start, and I’m sold! 🥰
There were a couple of things in the book that left me a little confused, but they would definitely be spoilers, so I won’t get into them. Those moments ultimately influenced my 3.5-star rating. That said, I think the author did a really great job of challenging the traditional ideas we have about the afterlife and Hell and making me think about those concepts in a completely different way.
Overall, this was an interesting and unique addition to the romantasy genre, and I’m definitely glad I picked it up!
I thought the pacing and story development were done really well, and I genuinely enjoyed the FMC and MMC’s love story. Give me a yearning MMC who is obsessed from the start, and I’m sold! 🥰
There were a couple of things in the book that left me a little confused, but they would definitely be spoilers, so I won’t get into them. Those moments ultimately influenced my 3.5-star rating. That said, I think the author did a really great job of challenging the traditional ideas we have about the afterlife and Hell and making me think about those concepts in a completely different way.
Overall, this was an interesting and unique addition to the romantasy genre, and I’m definitely glad I picked it up!
November 6, 2026
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC
Stella makes a deal with a demon named Damien to save her dying sister, but of course, making deals with demons is never going to be that simple! She ends up in the Fringe, a realm above Hell, where things aren’t quite what they seem.
I enjoyed this one. It’s a pretty straightforward story, without a huge amount of action or twists, but it was an easy read and kept me interested.
I think where it fell a little flat for me was Damien. I wanted a bit more from him, especially considering he’s a demon who collects souls! I just didn’t feel there was a lot of character with him which could have been more.
But overall, I had a good time reading it. It’s not a book that’s going to blow you away, but not every book has to be! Sometimes you just want something enjoyable and a handy palette cleanser.
And it’s a standalone! Which, considering the number of unfinished fantasy series I’m currently reading, is definitely a bonus.
Stella makes a deal with a demon named Damien to save her dying sister, but of course, making deals with demons is never going to be that simple! She ends up in the Fringe, a realm above Hell, where things aren’t quite what they seem.
I enjoyed this one. It’s a pretty straightforward story, without a huge amount of action or twists, but it was an easy read and kept me interested.
I think where it fell a little flat for me was Damien. I wanted a bit more from him, especially considering he’s a demon who collects souls! I just didn’t feel there was a lot of character with him which could have been more.
But overall, I had a good time reading it. It’s not a book that’s going to blow you away, but not every book has to be! Sometimes you just want something enjoyable and a handy palette cleanser.
And it’s a standalone! Which, considering the number of unfinished fantasy series I’m currently reading, is definitely a bonus.
Review of advance copy received from Author
TORRI ATE WITH THIS BOOK 😭😭🖤
‘𝓢𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝓶𝓮 𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝓶𝓾𝓬𝓱 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓱𝓪𝓽𝓮 𝓶𝓮, 𝓵𝓸𝓿𝓮. 𝓤𝓼𝓮 𝓶𝓮.’
Stella makes a deal with a stranger… little did she know that stranger was the devil. and he is going to collect what is his. 😈
i absolutely loved this so much. Damien??? he’s a new book boyfriend 😮💨 my god i ate him up. and i absolutely loved the bambi nickname 🥹 it was so cute. everything about this book was so interesting! I knew from early on that this was going to become a new favorite for me! Torri’s writing is always so captivating and you can tell that her stories are always so unique and original!
i don’t want to say too much because i don’t want to spoil this story but please add this to your tbr and check it out when it releases on 09/11 🤭
🖤 devil x human
😈 obsessed mmc
🖤 YEARNING
😈 dark romantasy
🖤 gothic underworld
😈 soul bargain
🖤 slow burn
‘𝓢𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝓶𝓮 𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝓶𝓾𝓬𝓱 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓱𝓪𝓽𝓮 𝓶𝓮, 𝓵𝓸𝓿𝓮. 𝓤𝓼𝓮 𝓶𝓮.’
Stella makes a deal with a stranger… little did she know that stranger was the devil. and he is going to collect what is his. 😈
i absolutely loved this so much. Damien??? he’s a new book boyfriend 😮💨 my god i ate him up. and i absolutely loved the bambi nickname 🥹 it was so cute. everything about this book was so interesting! I knew from early on that this was going to become a new favorite for me! Torri’s writing is always so captivating and you can tell that her stories are always so unique and original!
i don’t want to say too much because i don’t want to spoil this story but please add this to your tbr and check it out when it releases on 09/11 🤭
🖤 devil x human
😈 obsessed mmc
🖤 YEARNING
😈 dark romantasy
🖤 gothic underworld
😈 soul bargain
🖤 slow burn
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I read the blurb of this book and loved the premise of it. I loved Damien was the devil that fell in love with a human. It gave me Beauty and the Beast vibes but with a darker undertone. Stella is selfless and brave for putting her sister's life before her own and she continues to show her bravery throughout the book. I admired her resilience even as times seemed dark and she was ready to give up. I can see why she was a match for Damien. The author did a beautiful job slowly revealing Damien's obsession and the history of it. I felt the Devil had a romantic side to him and appreciated his protectiveness towards Stella. I felt like the ending was a tad rushed and i would have enjoyed an epilogue, but it still felt like satisfying ending. This was a fun mixture of tropes and I'm glad I branched out to try this one
September 15, 2026
Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read and review.
This book follows Stella, who wants to save her sister life and accidentally ends up making a deal with the devil. Unfortunately, this one didn't really work for me. I went into it expecting a dark romance, but I personally didn't find it very dark. If anything, some of the characters and their interactions felt quite juvenile. The constant back and forth between the main characters became very repetitive for me. They seemed to keep going around in circles, and I was getting close to DNFing at one point. I wanted so much more world building. The concept had plenty of potential, and I think a darker, more developed world could have made the story much more immersive. The ending also felt quite rushed.
Overall, I think this book had an interesting premise and some elements I enjoyed, but I was left wanting more.
This book follows Stella, who wants to save her sister life and accidentally ends up making a deal with the devil. Unfortunately, this one didn't really work for me. I went into it expecting a dark romance, but I personally didn't find it very dark. If anything, some of the characters and their interactions felt quite juvenile. The constant back and forth between the main characters became very repetitive for me. They seemed to keep going around in circles, and I was getting close to DNFing at one point. I wanted so much more world building. The concept had plenty of potential, and I think a darker, more developed world could have made the story much more immersive. The ending also felt quite rushed.
Overall, I think this book had an interesting premise and some elements I enjoyed, but I was left wanting more.
September 30, 2026
Torri Heat has a way of writing a book about making a deal with the devil for your soul sound like not such a bad thing.
Realm of the Wicked is a dark romance about Stella the FMC whose sister Grace is dying. When a random encounter with the MMC Damien (which you find out later is not so random) asks her if she would do anything to save her sisters life like you know selling her soul. Well needless to say of course she says yes not having any clue that he is the actual devil and intends to collect.
I thought the plot was very interesting and with all the banter and spice that the main characters had going on you will not be disappointed in this book. Loved Damien and Stella so much I thought the ending was a little rushed but overall, I was very happy with how it ended.
Thank you Netgalley and Torri Heat for this amazing ARC this is my honest review.
Realm of the Wicked is a dark romance about Stella the FMC whose sister Grace is dying. When a random encounter with the MMC Damien (which you find out later is not so random) asks her if she would do anything to save her sisters life like you know selling her soul. Well needless to say of course she says yes not having any clue that he is the actual devil and intends to collect.
I thought the plot was very interesting and with all the banter and spice that the main characters had going on you will not be disappointed in this book. Loved Damien and Stella so much I thought the ending was a little rushed but overall, I was very happy with how it ended.
Thank you Netgalley and Torri Heat for this amazing ARC this is my honest review.
September 2, 2026
Despite giving this book only 2 stars, I couldn't stop reading this book and I'm really glad I picked it up.
The story development was really good and the pace was perfect. There was no point that I thought it was either going too fast or too slow.
The reason for the low star rating was more about not understanding a few things until the very end. This would have been fine but I felt that I really needed to know why Damien had taken such an interest in Stella from the start - especially as it wasn't really a MASSIVE plot twist at the end. I spent a lot of the book thinking it was going to be a huge reveal that was going to rock my world.
There wasn't and it didn't.
I will absolutely look out for more from this author because, as I have already said, their writing style was really good and I was immediately drawn in to the story.
The story development was really good and the pace was perfect. There was no point that I thought it was either going too fast or too slow.
The reason for the low star rating was more about not understanding a few things until the very end. This would have been fine but I felt that I really needed to know why Damien had taken such an interest in Stella from the start - especially as it wasn't really a MASSIVE plot twist at the end. I spent a lot of the book thinking it was going to be a huge reveal that was going to rock my world.
There wasn't and it didn't.
I will absolutely look out for more from this author because, as I have already said, their writing style was really good and I was immediately drawn in to the story.
September 11, 2026
I loved the beginning. The pacing was great, and the story pulled me in right away. Unfortunately, the execution did not live up to the concept, which was disappointing because I really wanted to love this book.
The chemistry between the characters felt forced, and I never connected with them as a couple. I liked Stella, but I did not care for Damien at all. I also struggled with the ending because it felt very rushed. I actually had to go back and reread it because I thought I had missed something.
For a dark romance, this was also waaay too mild for me. I truly loved the idea behind the story, which made it even more disappointing when the book did not deliver.
The chemistry between the characters felt forced, and I never connected with them as a couple. I liked Stella, but I did not care for Damien at all. I also struggled with the ending because it felt very rushed. I actually had to go back and reread it because I thought I had missed something.
For a dark romance, this was also waaay too mild for me. I truly loved the idea behind the story, which made it even more disappointing when the book did not deliver.
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