Unchained by Helen Hardt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dante Gabriel is starving. What he craves is red gold—human blood. After being held captive as a blood slave to a female vampire for years, he has finally escaped. Unchained at last, he follows his nose to the nearest blood bank to sate his hunger.

ER nurse Erin Hamilton expects just another busy night shift…until she finds a gorgeous stranger vandalizing the hospital blood bank. Though her logic tells her to turn him in, she’s pulled by stronger and unfamiliar emotions to protect the man who seems oddly infatuated with her scent. Chemistry sizzles between them, but Dante, plagued by nightmares of his time in captivity, fears he won’t be able to control himself…especially when he discovers a secret she doesn’t even know she’s hiding.

Unchained

A bit slow moving but still interesting.

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💚💜❤️
Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍
Character development: 😟🙁☺️😍
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Dual Narration

The Hero: Dante – he was kept as a blood slave for years. He was tortured by the human servants that guarded him and was forced to submit to “her”. She fed from him and forced him to only feed from her. He was denied the varied tastes of blood from different humans. He loved the redheads, the dark-haired ones with light skin and the one-of-a-kind flavor unique to every human. He dreamt about the sustenance making him strong enough to break free when he slept, but always woke to his captivity, until one day he finally got free and ran.

The heroine: Erin – she was an ER nurse in New Orleans. One day she had to run to the blood bank to grab blood for a patient, when she finds the door to the blood bank open. She is accosted by a man with blood on his hands, who had obviously been wreaking havoc on the blood supply. He covers her mouth and smells her saying how good she smells. He says the blood from the supply wasn’t working and he pleads with her to help him.

The Story: Dante wanted to stay after Erin went back to the ER, but he didn’t want “her” to track him. He had been taken when he was young, just eighteen, a late bloomer and a vampire by birth. She told him she was his queen and kept him in her dungeon for untold years. He didn’t know if his once powerful family was still alive. He finds Erin in the parking lot and gets her to help him by taking him to her place in her car.

The chemistry between Erin and Dante was strong from the start, even though Dante wasn’t all that experienced since he was taken when he was so young. Though when things started to get hot and heavy, Dante was afraid he would hurt Erin. She really wanted to take things further, and felt a need to be near him and she trusted him. I hate when things start to heat up and you get let down like that when one of the main characters keeps backing off for some reason or another.

Dante had some PTSD from his time in captivity and “she” kept infiltrating his thoughts. He found his way home to his grandfather and cousin, only to find his father and uncle had come after him when he disappeared, and they also had never returned. He feared they may have been killed or kept in the same place as him.

Vampires were very different in this book than in any other I have read. They can eat, but just need the extra minerals in blood. The immortality thing was a myth, and they weren’t self-healing like in the myths. I don’t really understand why she even made a vampire book if they didn’t have all the benefits of immortality, though they were stronger and faster than humans. They can be burned in the sun though, so it seems being a vampire was much more of a negative than a positive.

I didn’t really understand some of the things Dante did. He was obviously suffering from PTSD, and he had a strong feeling that “she” was still looking to take him back, but he didn’t seem to be trying to hide himself at all. He went to stay with his grandfather who was the oldest living male vampire on the planet, and he knew that “she” knew who his family was. Yet he didn’t tell his family where he had been or what happened to him. The story moved a bit slowly for my liking but was still interesting.

This audiobook was told in dual points of view via dual narration. It was narrated by John Lane and Lauren Rowe. John has a super deep voice, which I like for a book like this. He was a bit stiff, but otherwise did a good job. Lauren Rowe she has a soft feminine voice, but her tempo makes it obvious she is reading. Overall, the narration could have been better, but it wasn’t bad enough to annoy me.

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