I loved this!

We had:
🤍 Space pirates
🤍 Stabby heroine + cinnamon roll hero (with a twist)
🤍 Fated mates
🤍 Aphrodisiac saliva
🤍 Cool female alien side characters (there are criminally too few of these in other books tbh)

The tone of this book perfectly thread the mood-needle I was in (you don’t even want to know how many alien roms I DNFed before this one). We had some action and emotion but mostly it was all about really compatible characters being super soft for each other. My heart.

The worldbuilding was great—these aliens were planet-less space refugees with an interesting culture and political situation that I’m looking forward to exploring more in the other books.

And this couple’s dynamic was really unique. On the one hand, we had a classic stabby heroine + cinnamon roll hero couple. Raina was loyal, aggressive, and kicked alien butt. And Niko was a charming and smirky pirate, always the first person voting for Raina to be included in (even in charge of) dangerous situations (and more than a little excited by her tying him up at gun point).

Yet on the other hand, Niko’s crazy fated mate horny brain would go into bossy boots mode. And Raina was into it, and Niko made sure she was into it. So their whole vibe was switch-y, the dirty talk was 🔥, the consent was 🔥🔥, and I was rooting for them so hard.