Boring waste of time!
Seriously repetitive, long drawn out, badly written rubbish. The character thoughts were cringing and Spider's repetitive 'threats' were not good. The heroine just constantly and repetitively thought of the colony and her friend Sarah, his 'threats', and needing to escape, but never actually trying to escape. It was all so boring and irritating.
Both main characters were unlikable, much of Emma's insta-lust thoughts were ridiculous given what Spider did to her. It also wasn't possible to like Spider after he deliberately hurts and humiliated herconstantly. I like a darker romance, they're my favourite reads, that's not the problem, the problem was that the writing was so basic it didn't create a dark read, just a stupid ridiculous read.
For example-
1) a girl raised in a cult, where she was not allowed to even look men in the eye, would not have so many immediate insta lust filled thoughts about Spider, a guy who is always hurting and humiliating her.
2) she wouldn't be wet when forced to strip in front of half the men in the MC. Then later, in front of the whole club of men and women.
3) Would she really want a man who painfully took her virginity using his fingers in front of all those strange men?
4) Or that he would suddenly not want all other women and only had eyes for her? I was rolling my eyes at that point.
5) It was annoying how the author kept contradicting her own characters, one minute she had these guys so brutal that they would kill an innocent girl just for trying to steal a tip jar with only a couple hundred dollars in it. But then making them out to be the nicest guys on the planet because they stop other guys from beating women?! It's ridiculous. They had none of the complexities of dark anti-heros
6) All the heroine's over the top, and immediate insta-lust filled thoughts for him were just too obvious and too much. Again it was like the author claimed this was a dark romance but chickened out by writing the heroine as completely in lust with him, and him sickly sweet, to make it okay what he does to her.
7) The heroine's constant back and forth about liking what he does to her but not liking what he does to her and all her guilt she feels for liking it, was irritating.
8) As was his constantly threatening to kill her in every chapter. Every, single, chapter!
9) The way she kept 'looking at the gun", as if it was all the author could think up to let the guy do what he wanted to her.
10) The way the hero thinks made me cringe badly at times. Like when he thinks "the MC Gods need appeasing and I will be the one to provide them their sustenance". Urgh! Awful.
It's very juvenile how he thinks, another example was when he deals with the bouncer 'He thinks guarding ths door will give him something to brag about to his mates. So I tell him to "Beat it, d**kwad", his face goes white and he scurries off'. It was cringe worthy it was so immature.
As for the writing-
11) The author's vocabulary is basic which made the repetition worse, because the same words are used so much. She keeps repeating the same phrases over and over dozens of times, just a couple examples, whatever emotion the heroine is feeling at the time melts away, or burns away, her mouth waters, loneliness or desperation 'hooks' into her. Sarah's out there... if the colony haven't found her, I have to find her" etc are all repeated dozens of times. It's just way too repetitive.
12) The grammar is really bad, especially when it comes to combined words like he'd, we'd, they'd. For example, "He'd showed us...". And the poor punctuation.
13) It's also a cliffhanger.
I like a darker romance but this just wasn't written very well. So honestly I don't think I'll read the next book, not even if it's free on KU. Basic and lacking substance behind the characters, their thoughts and behaviours. Boring waste of time! I checked the author's page and it's no wonder there is no substance to this story, and no real effort apparently put in to the writing because it seems this is one of those so called authors that churns out two books a month.