I wake up chained to the bed of a stranger.
Unleashed
He says I’m his wife.
I have nothing—no money. No friends.
No escape.
He’s everything I never imagined: ruthless, calculating, feared. A beautiful monster with a face like a god’s, cold and untouchable.A mafia kingpin whose wealth could buy empires and whose power makes the world tremble.
My captor.
My husband.
He vows to protect me at all cost, and in return demands…everything.
My body. My obedience. My submission.
Every touch, every brutal kiss stirs a dangerous desire neither of us can control. His words may be laced with venom, but his touch is fire, and every time he’s near, I burn.
As days bleed into weeks, the fog of my past refuses to lift. The more I fight it, the harder I’m pulled into his orbit.
But as my memories start to unravel, I wonder—what if the past I can’t remember holds the key to our destruction?
And when the truth finally comes out…will either of us survive?
For readers of the Wicked Vows series, this is a fully standalone book one in a brand new spin-off series: Polina’s story.
Chained, Wed, and Forgetful
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💛💚
Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Chemistry: 🧪🧪🧪🧪
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏
Character development: 😋😉😎😮
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Dual Narration
Characters and Plot Summary
Polina is the adopted daughter of one Bratva family, a free spirit who bristles at being told what to do. When a threat her brothers thought was finished resurfaces, she’s sent into hiding. Her rebellious streak then lands her in the territory of Rafail, the pakhan of another family. Rafail took over after his parents died and had to guard his younger siblings from a young age, and he is in a fury because his bride just left him at the altar.
Polina loses her memory before she ever reaches his compound. She wakes up chained to a stranger’s bed, and he tells her she’s his wife. The woman who actually ran is “Anissa,” and Rafail hands Polina that story, planning to make his runaway bride pay. Over the following weeks Polina fights the fog of her past while getting closer to him and to his family.
Highlights and Limitations
The push and pull between these two is what kept me listening. Rafail is cold, possessive and frightening, and Polina never turns into a doormat. She keeps her fight even while her body is betraying her around him. The captor-who-calls-himself-husband setup could have been a one-note kink premise, but the fact that she doesn’t know whether to believe him gave the early chapters real tension. I also liked that Polina gets pulled into his family’s orbit, because it made his world feel lived in rather than just menacing.
The amnesia, though, is a double-edged sword. With her memory gone, Polina is a blank for a big chunk of the book, and I wanted more of the spitfire we’re told she is. Her personality really surfaces near the end. The action is also packed into the last few chapters, so the middle felt repetitive to me, with the same push and pull replaying before the story finally moved.
Here’s what I wished had been handled differently. Rafail tells Polina more than once that she needs to learn her place, and then he softens so quickly that the earlier cruelty barely seems to cost him anything. I wanted him to work harder for her. I also kept wondering how nobody in his family realized Polina wasn’t the woman he was supposed to marry.
Narration
The audiobook runs about 9 hours and 23 minutes, narrated by Aaron Shedlock and Kai Kennicott. Listeners are divided, and I understand why. The voices are distinct, which helped me keep track of who was speaking. But Polina’s voice read a little stiff to me for a woman who’s supposed to be headstrong, and Rafail sounded older than I’d pictured a pakhan with younger siblings to protect. It never stopped me from listening, but I’d have liked more heat and youth in the performance during the push-and-pull scenes.
Final Thoughts
I’m giving this a solid 4 stars. It’s a standalone with no other-woman drama and no cliffhanger, and it delivers a hard-won happy ending, which I always appreciate in a dark romance. If you love captivity and amnesia tropes and an obsessive, jealous anti-hero, you’ll probably devour it. It’s a slow build with a strong finish, so be patient with the middle. And note that Rafail is possessive and controlling by design, so know your own tolerance going in.
