one star is too much. let me begin by saying that. let me continue by saying this book does a complete disservice to the rest of the series. compared to how much plot and intrigue was in each book, how much history and love was between each character so clear, i feel like im not being dramatic at all when i say this book is a disgusting add-on and ending to a series that started out so strongly.

my poor, sweet people. tristan and morana, you were done so wrong. if i could rewrite how they ended, i would. they were put into this box, and they seemed at a distance. their communication issues weren’t addressed. morana never told him about her left arm. runyx repeatedly put morana in situations where she withheld information from tristan, and not once were we shown him being aggravated that he kept getting left in the dark.

it wasnt just morana that did this, and i understand why she did, but still. it was also dante, and lyla. personally, after getting left out time and time again, i would start to let out some frustration, and tristan i think would start to get angry and feel like he was losing control, but he didnt. Ever. this is just ..not his character? i just dont think he wouldve been ok with this, especially since the information was about his sister and morana.

this book shouldve been a long dedication to tristan. his reunion with lyla was the most anticipated moment from every reader, and we didnt get his POV of it. only after did we get a slight reflection. no, instead it was in lyla’s pov, then dante’s, NEVER HIS. Never Tristan, who imagined that moment his entire life. we dont get to see what was going through his head.

im so angry on his characters behalf. he was constantly sidelined throughout this entire book. he was not who we’ve seen before, in high power. it was like he had no purpose, because runyx wrote it this way. im so sad he was not given justice throughout this. he never said i love you to morana, or even wore the wedding ring—which made NO sense. the whole thing of him not saying those words was because his sister was gone. he found her, he shouldve gotten to say them to morana. it shouldve been such a beautiful moment.

it never came. not to mention, she left out that beautiful scene between them at the end in the hospital, where tristan proposes. this was such a poor decision on runyx’s part. no offense, but i dont care how emotional it made lyla to see it, i care about how much it meant to morana to have after facing yet ANOTHER trauma.

we didnt get their vows. tristan didnt wear a ring. their epilogue was 2 pages. we get a one sentence explanation of morana being pregnant, a one sentence statement of them adopting xander. we didnt get to see ANYTHING.

Morana losing any function in her left arm was just .. vile. And disgusting. she was suffering through this pain in her arm for the ENTIRE book, and not one person saw it except for dainn. not even tristan. It was SO out of character. All of the dv characters are intuitive and extremely smart, all of them protective of each other, and they didnt notice morana’s pain?

Its a joke. A huge, big joke. And then to put her into a car crash, drugged, her kidnapped, put into the hospital, and THIS:

“She'd halted at the door, looking at the woman she was bonded to for life, clutching onto her shirtless, scarred, bandaged brother and blubbering something about a tie”

this is so gross and such a heartless thing to do to morana, i dont even care that its ‘dark romance’ or runyx’s dumb explanation on facebook. if you felt the need to explain yourself because so many people were outraged, then yeah, it was a terrible decision.

the line about tying tristan’s tie. this broke my heart. like this poor girl. she sacrifices so much. she was kidnapped, beaten in her own home, thrown down the stairs by her father, watched her bio dad die right in front of her, was shot and almost died, had no support growing up, and now, she loses her arm.

I feel like idont even need to say this anymore, but there wasn’t anything deep about morana learning how to do things with one hand. its mentioned she does in the epilogue, but i wanted something that was actually.. emotional???? like dont give us info bombs and then move on. youre a writer!! WRITE.

dante and amara. First let me ask WHY. Why were they given NO storyline? why did runyx not expand on amara’s stress as a mother and managing work and her marriage? why was there not a huge talk between her and dante about having more kids, instead being an on the whim conversation? why was there not a conversation between tristan and dante after finding lyla? and dante was given nothing. literally no storyline.

they adopt lex?? let me make it clear that 1) this isnt mentioned in their epilogue. 2) we dont get to see any of this process. amara wanting to do it, dante even MEETING lex, the official adoption, NOTHING. Not xander and lex opening up about dainn and their past, just nothing.

Let me get into the worst decision for amara BY FAR. There was not a single reason, NOT ONE, to kill off her mother, except for shock value and to add on yet another trauma to amara’s life. her mother that she loved so much, that was her rock, DEAD. For not a single reason at all. Vin, ALSO DEAD. LIKE WHY??? they’ll never see amara’s kids grow up, they’re just dead. Oh, and her mom dying? simply two lines of acknowledgment in her epilogue. Once again, we didnt actually see any of this process.

zephyr and alpha. my favorite couple from the dv series, i think. runyx didnt know what to do with their characters, and its very easy to see that. she was at a dead end, so she made zephyr pregnant, and at the worst time, when she was in the middle of grieving.

i’ll just give you some storylines you couldve done! zephyr healing her relationship with her parents. alpha stepping back at work to support her. zephyr NOT quitting her job. more expansion on alpha getting small increments of his memories back. And dont even with the ‘he’ll never get them back’ because you went ahead and countered this with him getting a memory of hector back at the end of the book.

know what else couldve been done? zephyr connecting with amara and morana. we were told this happens. got small little scenes. got summaries. but there was nothing drawn out. no amara opening up about losing serenity, or zephyr and morana talking about zenith, or amara and morana talking about literally Anything?

almost forgot that zephyr’s father died, because it was such a throwaway line, put in there so suddenly and there was SAY IT WITH ME— NOTHING ABOUT IT. Like, oh, yeah, zephyr’s dad is actually a bad person :) OK moving on! God the writing in this is so choppy i could genuinely believe the past books were ghost written.

i dont even want to say anything about lyla and dainn. I think runyx said enough, because the syndicater was all about them. there was not a single chapter without a mention of the shadow man. i get he was connected to everything, but it still annoyed me. i think what runyx was getting at was this was all surrounded by dainn, that none of this would be reality without him, but it ISNT TRUE. i dont know why she pushed that it was all him, when it was MORANA that even started this whole series up.

“none of them had even known about the organization until Morana had become a part of their lives. It was like a pandora's box opened up when Tristan and Morana got together, aided by The Reaper and the Shadow Man, exposing them to The Syndicate.”

key word here: AIDED. It was NOT dainn. Morana is the heart of this series, and so is tristan, and they should’ve been treated as such.

i simply did not care about lyla and dainns relationship. dainn annoyed me with the whole ‘flamma’ thing. he bugged amara’s phone and listened into her conversations. he is creepy beyond levels, and not in the ‘hot’ way that runyx beats into your head every paragraph.

nothing about lyla and xander barely. xander finding out shes his bio mom? nope. xander talking about dainn? nope. what about xander talking to tristan about all of this? this may be surprising, but NOPE! Nothing! NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING HAPPENS. And when it does runyx loses her confidence or something to write about it and reverts back to calling all the mmc’s hot.

i could not stand the love bombing in dainns pov, or lyla’s pov. they had long, page consuming sonnets of how deep and unbreakable their love is, while the other couples just … didnt. runyx made it seem as if their love was incomparable and that theyd fought their entire lives for it. it is very clear where her bias lies, and who she really wanted to write about.

Now that we’ve established that we see nothing in this entire novel (if it can even be called that) what was it about, you may ask.

RUNYX REPEATING HERSELF. RESTATING. Writing one thing from two separate POV’s but not giving us a fresh perspective on it. Like alpha talking about zephyr at the beginning in his first pov, and then zephyr talking about the same exact thing in hers.

Next!!! I hated the Unknown chapters. All of those pov’s that took up pages, meanwhile he got only a few lines at the end of the book before being killed in one sentence. this also broke the usual way the other books worked, how we got the story through the characters pov’s, not some random guy.

another bad weird thing: “Tristan," he heard Morana warn from somewhere near his back but ignored her tone”

IGNORED. Tristan caine IGNORED morana???? the man who immediately finds her in a room, can read her body language, what she’s thinking, what she needs, Ignores her.

i get he was talking to lyla. i get he was finding out shocking information. i get it. but i hate it. i hate that he doesnt talk to morana about how overwhelming it all is and that he doesnt get the love he deserved to have when being written.

The worst part of this all????? IT WAS POINTLESS. “They weren't related by blood. The sister Tristan had loved and looked for all his life had never biologically been his.”

Okay. like i get she wanted to shock us all with this, but the thing is? there was no payoff. we dont get a ‘you’re still my sister, you’re still my brother’ from them. we dont get how this imapacted them, if it changed things, how much it hurt tristan to learn. NOTHING. THIS WHOLE BOOK IS A BUNCH OF NOTHING.

What we sacrificed to not get expansion on any of these major plots i mentioned? Four chapters straight of smut. that is what runyx deemed more important than the plot she has had set up since the first book.

I’m just… done. done with runyx. done with reading her books. done with this series. done with thinking about this. i hope runyx knows how much she ruined things. im assuming she does. im also assuming she just gave up with this and simply didnt care anymore. she threw in some smut and trauma for every character and called it a day.

i expected more. i think everyone did. i waited almost a year for this book, have been reading the series a bit longer. It didnt deliver in any way. i dont know if this can be fixed with a couple added pages or a novella like she’s saying (i think) but i honestly just wish she hadnt released this at all, sorry. this just wasnt good, plain and simple. anything that was interesting she cut off. anything complex she summed up in one paragraph and got back to how much dainn is obsessed with lyla.

i hated this. so much. so much i cant even explain. was reading and realized from the first ten pages she was about to ruin things, and she did. i know im being dramatic but i dont care. im honestly so upset and devastated this is the way the series is going out.

also was never cleared up what the bullets on every cover were (even tho we were told it would be)