What holds it together is the commitment. Dante is not a decent man with a soft centre waiting to be understood; he is a man who owns people and thinks in threats, and the book lets him be that for long enough that you earn every scrap of liking him by the finish. Kat is no ornament either, at least not at first: a former nurse with a brutal history and a mouth on her, and the early sparring is the sharpest writing in the whole thing. Kincaid writes in a clean, unfussy register the genre has largely forgotten, and the pace almost never stalls.

Where it wobbles for me is the middle, and it is the one place I wanted the book to bite harder. The first third runs on real hostility, Kat giving as good as she gets, and then somewhere past the halfway mark that friction goes soft: the resistance that made her interesting thins out, the arguments turn into a long run of steamy scenes, and for a stretch I was more invested in the family politics than in the couple. A listener reviewing the audio put it better than I can, saying it starts strong, that there is some bite to the female lead, and then all too soon it goes flat. The counterweight is real, though: what the middle loses in snap it partly earns back once the plot remembers it has secrets, and the last act pays off threads I had stopped keeping track of. A wobble, not a collapse.

What surprised me more than the heat was the engineering. The rumour that hangs over Dante, that he wiped out his fiancee and her family the night before their wedding, is handled early as pure menace and then turned inside out, and the reveal does the rare thing of making him more interesting without making him harmless. Add a supporting cast far more fun than a criminal family has any right to be, a father who deserves everything that is coming to him, and a genuine happily ever after with no cliffhanger bolted on.

On audio, this is a proper duet and it matters. Sebastian York has the kind of voice built for cold authority, and he plays Dante as a man who has never once needed to raise it: measured, low, quietly dangerous, which makes the rare moments he loses the thread land hard. Maxine Mitchell carries Kat's defensive edge and her vulnerability without letting either swallow the other. Ten and a bit hours is a committed weekend of listening, and the reading is steady enough that it never once feels like homework.

One note before you start, kept separate from any criticism because it is not one: this is a captivity story with graphic violence, a past sexual assault told in flashback and explicit sex throughout, and the enemies to lovers label fits the shelf rather better than it fits the first half. If forced proximity as a romance is a hard limit for you, this is not the book to bend it on.

If that sounds like your evening, the site already carries Kincaid's The Auction, which opens a different series of hers. For the same taste of a dangerous power couple, Condemned to Love starts another crime family from nothing, and Cruel King keeps the possessive king but moves the crown to a school. Begin wherever you like, then come back and agree with me that Dante was the right one anyway.