Beginnings by Sandra R. Neeley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Black Ops Lieutenant Maddox Larsen is missing. Not only is he missing, his entire team is missing. Their reality has been yanked from beneath them, replaced with a sadistic, twisted doctor eager to find just what the limitations of a soldier’s body and mind are. Unfortunately, Maddox and his men are not alone, there are others like them locked in this nightmarish facility. They barely survive torture, abuse, and drug induced changes of their DNA. Their needs have become simple: Food, Fight, Fornicate. Maddox exceeds all expectations and becomes the model by which all other males in the facility are measured. These males are no longer men, or even human for that matter. They are Variant. But now they’re free, and they’re angry. Their target? Those who made them what they are today.

Nina struggled most of her adult life just to survive. She made the fateful decision to marry her high school sweetheart right after graduation — now she’s his favorite punching bag. He interrupts her when she finally seizes a chance to run from him, and almost kills her. She loses consciousness, awakening to a nightmare worse than she ever imagined. She’s at the mercy of five predatory, aggressive males, all locked in a prison cell with her. Sold to a medical facility as a reward for their test subjects for good behavior, her hell has only just begun. Eventually the most volatile of them claims her, giving her a slight reprieve. But then he disappears, leaving her in the hands of all the others. He better hope he’s dead, because now she’s free and if she discovers he intentionally left her behind, her wrath will make the monster that created them seem like their best friend.

Warning: If you have any triggers at all, please do not buy this book. This book shows the violence and abuse required to turn highly trained soldiers into killing machines with no thought of right and wrong. This book shows the plight of the women who are given to them as ‘rewards’ for good behavior. While the first few chapters are dark, this story ultimately becomes a tale of survival, revenge, and ultimately love, that will always eventually overcome all.

Beginnings

Genetically modified super soldiers!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙🖤💚💜❤️
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍🌎
Character development: 😔😅😂🤣

The Hero: Maddox (a.k.a. One, a.k.a. Lethal) – he was special forces in the military and good at his job, but when his superiors started giving his unit orders to do some terrible things, like take out another unit and blame it on their enemy, then Maddox refused to follow orders and beat his commander to death. He was court martialed and sentenced to death, though they gave him a choice to instead be sent to a black site experimental facility where men like him were sent when the government could no longer trust them or when they had crossed the line into near insanity.

The heroine: Nina – she grew up in Louisiana with an alcoholic father and a strong Korean mother. When she was seventeen, after her father died, she wanted to get out from under the tight control her mother held over her, so she married a guy named Bryant. Most of the residents in town were racist and it turned out Bryant was the worst of them. He was controlling and abusive and she had enough.

The Story: One day Nina leaves work early and goes home to quickly pack some clothes and get the money she had saved up, planning to leave Bryant and skip town. Only she didn’t know that one of her co-workers called Bryant at his work and told him that she left work. Bryant was through with her and knocked her out calling his friend Caul to help get rid of Nina. It turned out that the two friends and a few other guys had been kidnapping minority women from nearby towns for a while and selling them to some military guys who give them as gifts to military prisoners who toe the line.

The top-secret facility turned out to be much worse than purported. It was in fact a research facility where scientists were working with splicing DNA and drug concoctions in an attempt to create super-soldiers. The men who were imprisoned there were subjected to torture, abuse and terrible experiments till they became near animalistic and only thought of their basic needs, violence, and sex.

I have been really into the genetic experiments or super soldier type books lately. Though they usually do follow a similar storyline. That of the torturous experiments, in a research facility, where they are imprisoned and often abused by the people in charge. That is fine though since most differ in the way the story goes. This one was different in that they captured women to give as gifts. I liked Nina from the start since she was strong enough to try to get away from her abuser, even though she ended up worse off than before. I also liked how this one differed from many of the others when they got away from those holding them.

I liked the fact that Maddox claimed Nina as his as soon as he finally got her as one of his rewards, but of course once he let it be known that he claimed her, the scientist started using Nina against him to get him to comply more. Until Maddox’s squad did so well that they were sold to a man in Columbia. The scientist told Maddox that Nina would be given to another squad leader since it worked so well with him. This is the part that I really liked in the book, because I hoped it wouldn’t be long before squad A killed the new owners and went after Nina. Though it didn’t happen at all like I thought it would. I always like unpredictability in a story, so I was happy about that, and it turned out that I really liked the path the story took.

I loved how One (Maddox) was the total alpha male of his squad and even over all the other squads, and I loved how he knew Nina was his and stayed the course on her being his even despite the fact that they were separated for a long time, while she was still being used and abused in that same facility. The story was much better than I expected, and I definitely plan to read more of this series.

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