I started writing this review when I was five hours into this audiobook so I could focus my frustrations and work out what it was that I wasn't enjoying. Ultimately, that turned out to be pretty much everything. After the events of Kingdom of the Wicked, I was looking forward to continuing with Emilia's investigation into Vittoria's murder and seeing how she bent the demon princes to her whim to ensure that she got the answer she deserved. That is not the book I got. There's no plot at all for the first 75% of the book, instead it's just focused on Emilia flip-flopping between "Wrath betrayed me" and "I want to fuck Wrath." I love an enemies-to-lovers dynamic, so normally I'd be fine with this but that's not the dynamic we got. It felt like their relationship was being arbitrarily drawn out, with no actual conflict to determine why they would *almost* sleep together then change their minds. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a romance reader, and that I had no idea that this book had jumped up to NA fantasy romance (as opposed to KOTW's YA fantasy) so I was bored as hell for most of this book by the flirting and the betrayal? Well. I've read Kingdom of the Wicked several times, and always felt like Wrath's so-called betrayal was bland as fuck. He's actually pretty tame for a demon prince, so his 'betrayal' didn't even make me blink. It certainly didn't seem to justify spending like four chapters at the start of this book repeating how betrayed Emilia felt *every single time she mentioned him.*

People who love romance are gonna love this book, probably, and I love that for them. But if you're looking for plot, look somewhere else. I was listening to this while I was working and I kept physically rolling my eyes at the overly flowery prose. Weirdly I liked the prose in the first book, but when nothing was happening it just seemed like it was being pretentious. I really do think that romance readers will be so pleased with this instalment because the spice between Wrath and Emilia is probably great, and I'm mostly annoyed that it wasn't better publicised that this was a NA romance sequel because I was expecting it to match KOTW in tone and genre.

Also I was expecting something... more after the end of the first book. Emilia talked about becoming some vicious, vengeful queen, and she's not that. I wanted a badass character, something like Beyond the Ruby Veil, and instead I got.... bland Emilia. She was even more soft and toothless than she was in the first book somehow, for all her talk of being fierce and murderous. Also she's a mystical shadow witch yet does basically no magic in this book, just waits around for people to reveal plot points to her while she moons over Wrath.

I guessed both of the big reveals within the first hour of this audiobook (which incidentally made the incredibly dramatic backing music just seem funny) and honestly? Those were the only things that really happened in this book. The final three chapters are interesting and build up for book 3, but this suffered with book 2 syndrome worse than anything I've read in a long while. I ended up skimming several chapters to get ahead because I was so bored of the same thing happening over and over again. The audiobook was just 14 hours of foreplay and flirtation building up to them having sex and I didn't care about it at all.

Also, and there are slight spoilers here, there was a whole section of this that just made me feel grimy.

Spoiler

Wrath is teaching Emilia to resist the other demons' control, and he uses their powers against her so she can get used to throwing them off. But he kept using that control to make her strip and it felt so gross to me. I don't know. They were still in their weird flirtation bit at that point, and I would have liked any kind of idea of mutual consent in that particular power imbalance, especially with Emilia still insisting that she hates him on every other page. This scene being followed with "he may make me strip or beg but he'd never take true advantage" made me actually want to scream.

I do like Emilia and Wrath's relationship and with the final three chapters ending the way they do, I do intend to read the final book so I can find out what happens in the plot. But honestly? In three bullet points I could summarise the plot of this book so succinctly that you could skip it entirely and wait for the third book.