Fallen Royal by Rachel Van Dyken

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“The truth may hurt for a little while, but a lie hurts forever.”—Ryan Bigge

🔪

I grew up knowing it would happen one day. 

🗡

Believing that I would fall into my father’s footsteps and become a monster of my own making. 

🩸

So I fought it. 

🩸

I lived. 

🩸

I loved. 

❤️

I teased. 

😍

And then one day… I destroyed. 

🖤

And realized I loved the pain. 

❤️‍🔥

Obsessed over the feeling. 

💉

So I cut again and again and again. 

🔪

She saw my rage, my madness, and tried to stop me from destroying myself, and I hated her for it, pushing her away past the point of no return. 

💣

Izzy Abandonato was supposed to be mine. 

👩🏻‍❤️‍👨🏼

But there are some things people can never come back from. I hurt her, she hurt me, and now I’m living a lie. Telling the ones I love that I’m on one side when for years I’ve been forced to play both. 

😡

I’m not the hero. 

🦸🏼‍♂️

I’m the villain. 

🧟‍♂️

And I may single-handedly bring down the Cosa Nostra—by default. 

🙅🏼

I, Maksim Sinacore, will have my vengeance. 

🔱

I will win her back. 

👩🏻

Even if it means I have to kill everyone in my path. 

🩸

The pain masks the betrayal. 

👿

I never realized that one day—I’d be the very rat that I hated. That I was sent to kill. But once you’re deep in a lie—you’ll do anything to hide the truth. 

🐀

She fell for the bad one. 

❤️‍🩹

She fell for the sinner. 

💔

So why does that make me smile?

Fallen royal

A very different kind of Mafia story!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💋💋💋💋💋
Heat/Steam: 🥵🥵🥵
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📒
World building: 🌎🌍🌏🌎🌍
Character development: 👩🏻🧑🏼‍🦱👩🏻‍🦱👱🏻‍♂️🦸🏼‍♂️

The heroine: Izzy Abandonato – Has been in love with Maksim since they were ten years old. They both love learning and loved being together. Izzy is the twin sister to Asher (the enforcer of their family) and their father is Chase Abandonato who is both a mafia boss and a Senator.

The Hero(es): Maksim Sinacore – heir to the Sinacore thrown (Cosa Nostra). His father is Alexei who has both Petrov and Sinacore, a mixing of the oldest Italian Mafia Family and the brutal Russian Mafia. Maksim was finally asked to step up and be a killer for the family like his father and Maksim didn’t think he could do it. He and Izzy were both into science and math not violence.

The Story:Maksim took some steps to be able to step into his fathers shoes and and the fallout from what he did broke him and Izzy apart. He started seeing other girls and broke her heart. They are still in college at Eagle Elite but Maksim hasn’t been right since that first night he was asked to kill.

This was a terrific book that kept me on the edge of my seat. It had romance, love, steam, suspense and internal turmoil. It had a damaged Hero who tried so hard to be what everyone expected and wanted him to be that he tore himself apart and became a monster. But you couldn’t help but love him the more for it.

I will have to admit that this series shows all both the parent and the children as a pretty blood thirsty bunch of individuals and you can definitely see that many of them aren’t necessarily all there. But they deal with what they have been exposed to since they were children in different ways, including fighting, sparring enough to make each other bruised and bloody, pulling knives on each other and other people, and even getting into gunfights at times.

Maksim and Izzy were anomalies in the family in that they were more interested in studying than in being mafia leaders. Though we see in this book that their outward appearances hide very deep individuals. It was the best of the bunch so far, but I can’t wait to read King’s story as well.

I voluntarily read & reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts & opinions are my own.

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