3⭐️ 1🌶️
MOOD: adventurous, challenging, tense, sad
TROPES: fated mates, chosen one, age gap
GENRES: fantasy romance, contemporary romance


MAIN CHARACTERS: Natalia "Talia" Thornsgate and Declan Blackridge

THE GOOD: I was really into this for the first half and that's saying something because I'm a mood reader and I get easily distracted. I liked the worldbuilding and the character setup and even the less than ideal meet up of the main characters. What's not to like? Witches. Shifters. Magic. Scotland. Sexual tension. A mystery about the Throne. All great. Then the story started to drag and become repetitive with no forward momentum - lot's of training and characters talking about how they should talk but then not doing so. If the beginning and end of the book could be combined with a different ending/transition then that would have worked better IMO. 
THE NEUTRAL: The whole scars things was lost on me - especially at the end. Just saying the scars show your truth - like it's a catchy tagline but the character has to do something or show something. Maybe in the second book? but I'm probably not going to read it. Starting with chapter 18 or 19, it seemed like I was reading a proof and not a copy ready to go to print because of the amount of typos. 
THE MEH: The biggest disappointment was the lack of the Alphahole in a supposed Alpha romance. Declan is around and possessive when he's around but they aren't together often. Most of the book is just them being in separate rooms. There were two things I forgot - this was a slow burn (really a no burn) and there is a contiuation to the story, it's not a stand alone, so that's on me. However, there are things that happened at the end that just don't make sense except to set up the second book and even then could probably have done better at the start of the second book. It created a weird spike in the narrative after a few chapters of kind of nothing happening. This also is one of the books that I don't understand why there was a rape scene (which to be fair is all books really) but given when it occurs in the book it was even more confusing to me cause what was the point?

TW: (provided by the author) physical violence, profanity, descriptive sexual content, sexual scenes, attempted murder, murder, scenes were children are harmed, death, rape, torture, suicidal thoughts
DISCLAIMER: I received an advance review copy. This is my honest review.