5 stars

Sweet Lawd. This book... Hell, this whole trilogy has blown my mind. This author just put me through the meat grinder. I knew the conclusion was going to be intense. I just had no idea that it would be THIS intense. I came so close to biting my acrylic nails off so many times it isn't even funny which says something considering I spend a crapton of money on maintaining my princess nails. She is known for dark and twisty but this premise and this book... yeah, truly in a league of its own.

Paige and Brandon were on a seriously precarious journey in which the outcome was left unclear at the end of book two. It was still unclear until the last twenty or so pages if time would run out and Paige could be saved. It was filled with suspense like all of her other books but the suspense was on crack. There is a large part of me that wants to get in this author's mind to see how she comes up with the plots and details to write a story like this. And there is another part of me that doesn't want to do that because she is truly magical. It would be like having a unicorn as a pet and having it lose its mystique because it was no longer rare but instead was normal. Maybe that is why I love her so much because she is as far from normal or "thinking inside the box type woman" as a person can get which in turn makes me want to enter the dark side with her.

This book brings back certain other characters from the past and answers all the questions that had been brought up in the previous books. It covered all plot twists and then some that I didn't even know that I should have been thinking about. The characters are still well developed. Yet, this is nothing new as she is known to make me have those "a-ha moments" when the puzzle pieces all fit together. There were many moments that almost pushed me out of my comfort zone but somehow toed the line at not forcing me to stop. This book and this series are not for those who don't like to dabble in the dark. There are triggers but in the same breath, there aren't. This series reminded me that what a person likes sexually or ultimately does sexually is for their own reasons. Despite being extreme, there is nothing forced here.

I highly recommend anything and everything that this author writes. She truly is one of the best out there when it comes to writing outside the norm and pushing the limit between dark and twisty with fluffy and sweet. ( )