Title: Code Of Silence
Author: Shantal Tessier
Release Date: January 13, 2020
★★½
** Kindle Unlimited
"This isn't a marriage. It's a contract signed in blood."
Dangerous and feared.
Those words describe my future husband. Who just so happens to also be my ex-boyfriend.
It’s complicated. Two years ago, he broke my heart when he left me to do his father’s bidding. After months of crying, I finally accepted he was gone and wasn’t going to look back. That maybe he’d never loved me at all. I never wanted to see Luca again.
Now a cruel twist of fate has signed me over to him in a heartless deal. I’m his. He thinks he did me a favor, but I feel like I’ve been given a death sentence. He doesn't want to get married because he still loves me. No, he did it for money. More power.
I’m going to be a mafia wife. And there’s only one way out of it. Death.
But as it turns out, someone else doesn’t want me to marry the ruthless Luca Bianchi. And if he has his way, I’ll see that early grave.
Until now, I had pretty specifically avoided mafia romances because I suspected that they wouldn't be my thing and, having read this, I feel like I was probably right. While I did enjoy the reading experience (and actually kind of can't wait to read the spinoff series - especially Bones' book) I feel like there are a few subjective reasons that this book just didn't quite hit for me in the way that I was hoping.
First off, I do want to say that the chemistry between the two main characters was basically sizzle level sexy. I 100% believed it and I felt like that need that they felt for each other just jumped right off the page. If you're looking for steam, it's definitely there in this book. In fact, I feel like if this hadn't tried to be a romance I would have basically been in love with it.
Where this book sort of didn't hit for me was with the idea that I was supposed to believe that these two characters were actually in love with each other and that there's actually a happy ending for them. The feeling that I got is that these two were sort of obsessed with each other, driven by their attraction and sexual compatibility, and also sort of in love with the idea of being in love with each other and having a future together. It just didn't come together for me in a way that made me believe that they will be anything other than miserable in a toxic relationship they can't get out of in the future.
I actually do think the characters were pretty well formulated and felt authentic, I felt like their actions and reactions made sense and I could understand where they were coming from. I definitely didn't like or connect with either of the characters in any sort of significant way though. I felt like Haven was sort of an idiot, making solidly bad decisions throughout basically the entire book and I felt like Luca was just an irredeemable asshole. So, yeah, the characters made sense but they didn't really give me any incentive to root for them.
I'm also really uncomfortable watching a romantic lead do murders. I don't know, maybe that's just me, but that's a dark place that I can't quite bring myself to reconcile in my head. Don't get me wrong, I like dark and I like things that are kind of fu*ked up, but the level of dark and murdery in this particular type of world just... I can't super get down with it.
I know a lot of people are really into mafia romances and as someone who's having a definite moment with darker, grittier romances I think I might give it another try since I don't want to write it off based on one book, but this one just didn't get there for me. It was an enjoyable read while I was reading it, but in retrospect it's just not my jam and it didn't hit for me on a romance level.
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