Standalone
Reviewed by CJ | Rating: 4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥 (📱)
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Because the Night yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
OPENING HOOK
A woman goes to check on an old house, wakes up a 1,500-year-old vampire who’s been napping in the basement for seventy years, gets drained on the spot, and turned because he “felt bad.” That’s the whole book in one sentence and somehow it’s still not the most chaotic part.
THE FULL STORY — SPOILERS INCLUDED
Skye works for a company that manages property, including check-ins on vacant old estates apparently, and this house got tacked onto her schedule last minute, so she’s walking through it late in the day, going alone in a basement that feels wrong before she even knows why. Turns out the creepy vibe is being given off by ancient runes protecting Lucas, a vampire who used to run LA and has been on a seventy-year sabbatical, sleeping it off in this very basement of all places. She wakes him up, and he goes full instinct by bitins and draining her. Then, realizing he’s seventy years out of his own time with cars and city noise and lights he doesn’t recognize, decides to turn her instead of letting her die. He needs someone who actually knows this era to help him get his bearings, so it’s a little self-serving on his part, not some selfless “nice guy” move. Wildly inconvenient for Skye either way.
What he doesn’t know, is that there’s a thirty-year ban on creating new vampires that’s about to expire in a few days, put in place after a batch of newborns went on a killing spree a few decades back. So Lucas turning Skye lands them both right in the middle of vampire politics with a council, old families, and the whole “ignorance of the law is no excuse” argument getting thrown at them. Lucas handles it the way you’d expect a 1,500-year-old with one of the strongest bloodlines around to handle it: he murders the opposition as soon as they move to kill the newborn and gets talked into taking a seat on the board. Okay, not right away, since he has zero interest in politics or managing his kind, but eventually they wear him down.
This is done in only 225 pages, so it moves fast giving us a lot of background about the turf wars with old families, Lucas’s found-your-people cast of a family (Henry and Bennett are the standouts), and Skye trying to figure out how to function with sudden strength, heightened senses, and bloodlust while half the vampire population wants her dead just to make a point. It’s part organized crime, part vampire politics, part ‘these people have known each other for centuries and have zero sense of personal space anymore.’ Henry is absolutely the best part of the entire cast and I would kill for a brother like him.
BEST PART OF THIS BOOK
That’s an easy one. The family dynamic. Lucas, Henry, Bennett – they’re all so old and so codependent that boundaries just aren’t a concept anymore, and Skye gets pulled into that immediately. The banter between them all carries the whole book.
WORST PART OF THIS BOOK
It’s only 225 pages, so a lot fun got packed into a small bundle. The character and relationship development is fast-tracked, and we don’t get a ton of room to ease our way into it. That said, I think the speed was part of the fun here. I would’ve happily taken more pages if Kylie Scott ever wants to write another story in this universe with any of these characters. I’d buy that immediately.
THE STEAM RATING BREAKDOWN
🔥🔥🔥 — Warm. There’s romance woven through, and it’s a meaningful part of the story, but it’s not the main event given how much plot gets packed into so few pages. There are explicit open-door scenes.
THE ENDING — SATISFIED OR DISAPPOINTED?
Satisfied. I would’ve loved more on what happens next for Skye and Lucas, but for a novella, it does what it sets out to do. I respect it for what it is: a fun little tidbit of story, not trying to be more than that.
THE CHARACTER WE LOVED TO HATE
Marc, Lucas’s brother. He’s exactly the kind of family member you don’t mind seeing murdered.
WOULD WE REREAD IT?
Yes. Not anytime soon, but if I want a short, fun read, this is one I’d pick up again.
WHO IS THIS FOR
If you want something fast, funny, and action-packed with a found-your-people vampire household, this is it.
If you like: Vampires, found-family, comedy-horror, entertaining banter, supernatural romance
WHERE TO GET THIS BOOK
📖 Physical Book
Amazon | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible
📱 Ebook
Amazon Kindle
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MORE FROM THIS REVIEWER
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
📱 | Series: Standalone | Genre: Paranormal Romance | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥