ARC Review: Vow of Deception by Rina Kent. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Vow of Deception by Rina Kent

My rating: 5 of 5 stars.

My husband. My tormentor.
The most notorious man in the city offers me a job.
Act as his dead wife.
Adrian Volkov isn’t the type of person who takes no for an answer.
He commands with an iron fist and all his orders are met.
When he approaches me with the offer, I have two options.
Go to prison or put myself under his wrath.
I choose to have a roof over my head. What’s so hard about acting, right?
Wrong.
The moment I step into his wife’s shoes, everything spirals out of control.
My only way of survival is through Adrian.
Or is it?
Vow of Deception

I am addicted to dark mafia romance!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚💙💜🖤❤️
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📘📗📕📙📘
World building: 🌏🌏🌍🌏🌎
Character development: 😉😖🤨😤🥰

“Winter is no longer Winter. She’s Lia. She took my wife’s life, and her punishment is spending the rest of her existence being Lia’s replacement.”

The Hero: Adrian Volkov – An Obshchak in the Russian Bratva. The only one he answers to is the Pakhan (Leader of the Bratva). He may or may not have killed his wife Lia, and he is replacing her with Winter who he seems to want to turn into Lia completely.

The heroine: Winter Cavanaugh (a.k.a. Lia) – she is homeless and a drunk at the beginning of the book and it all seems to revolve around an accident that she can’t get over in which her baby died. Also the mayoral candidate and owner of a shelter touched her inappropriately and she fought her way out of the situation before giving him a swift kick to the family jewels. However, he turned up dead the next day and she is the chief suspect.

The Love Story: Adrian offers Winter food and shelter to slip into the place of his wife as opposed to going to jail for Murder. She has no other choices so agrees to do what he wants.

It seems from the beginning Adrian wants Winter to be a submissive little pushover and she isn’t that since she has been living on the streets. Adrian is always dominant and in control and Winter can’t seem to help herself from defying him. Though I must say he is a bit too strict for my tastes. He wants her to follow his every rule and he demands that she not talk back to him which includes questioning him when he tells her to do something.

There are so many different storylines in this book, one of which is the Bratva Brotherhood that Adrian belongs to. In the Throne Duet, Adrian is a trusted member of the Bratva, but in this book he seems to be hiding things from them and worried that he will be caught. He job as a Bratva leader is to find people for the Brotherhood to bribe so he is basically the tech genius of the mafia.

He finds out everything there is to find about everyone he can use something against. He ensures his place by always having some sort of dirt on his enemies and even his so called Brothers. However, they also seem to be keeping secrets from him.

What happened to the original Lia is somewhat of a mystery though we know (from Throne of Vengeance) that at some point either she or Winter ran to Raina asking for help getting away from Adrian, and Raina put her in a safe house. I say that because this scene was in Throne of Vengeance and Rai didn’t know that there were two Lia’s so it wasn’t really clear which one it was. All the different secrets and mysteries in this book kept me reading all night long. I couldn’t put it down and the ending was spectacular. I can’t wait for the next book!