lol What's so adorable is that Orpheus is just so eager to understand and learn what Reia likes/wants. But he tries to fight his nature for his sacrifices/companions even if they don’t give him the same. This doesn't have mindnumbing world building, or multiple family units with names you can't pronounce, a confusing magic system or generic bad guys. The book's writing is decent and the story up until that point was okay, but I wish the author had reconsidered her choices with Katerina.

Almost right away our MC Reia read very much like a mary-sue, sheltered but wise, weak but strong, doesn't like books but is knowledgeable about things like psychology and anatomy. He became a love-sick puppy with massive separation anxiety, he had no personality except to exist to please Reia. I can’t help but think… does it really need to be 450+ pages, or is there a lot of back and forth… unnecessary drama… etc. There's also a few times where she has too much bravado and ends up doing something reckless and rash, when in reality, it's just plain stupid.The brief companionship does little to ease his loneliness, and their lives were always, unfortunately, cut short. With the addition of a good editor, she could compete with the big name PNR authors, and this would be an automatic 5 ⭐️ read from me. I also thought that some of the language that was used didn't fit the world that the author was creating. This was thoroughly enjoyable with a few hiccups but they didn’t do much to deteriorate my pleasure.

When the next offering is due and the monstrous Duskwalker is seen heading their way, her village offers her an impossible choice - be thrown into the prison cells or allow herself to be sacrificed to a faceless monster. The first book of a series, especially a fantasy series, always has a tough job of world building, but Opal Reyne was able to get this book off the ground quickly with a simple premise: there are humans, and the demons who hunt them. This is just a personal preference, but when I read fantasy, I cannot stand when there are modern words or phrases. Watching Orpheus try so hard to give Reia everything she wanted was so sweet, and his petty jealousy with the other Duskwalker was adorable.But instead of seeing this point of view, Reia legit blames her since Katerina "never voiced her wants, had never denied Orpheus, simply because she was too blind to see he would have stopped touching if she has just simply said no. But even though Orpheus is super sweet, he's also 'super naughty' (as Reia likes to say), and most of the time, he doesn’t mean to be . I can withstand a lot of OW storylines, but this one just decimated Reia’s character (because of how she viewed said character’s experiences) and hurt Orpheus’s characterization as well. We are told that her suffering was self-imposed because she didn't give him a chance, that her painful experiences of SA were just because she "didn't tell him no. In one of the first physical scenes between Reia and Orpheus the author includes misinformation about what a hymen is, as well as the harmful purity stereotype that revolves around it.