Ascension (Winston Hills, Book 3), by C.M. Barnes | Free Audiobook
A chief executive by day, a masked dominatrix by night, and two people who refuse to stay in their lanes
Calla Black runs a company in daylight and, after hours, a room where she is known only as The Black Dahlia. She has arranged her life around control: work, rules, and a distance from everyone that she maintains on purpose and that nobody has tested in years. The arrangement holds until two people arrive in the same season and neither of them plays by the rules she wrote.
James Carter Jr is the Southern charmer who does not want to be in charge, and Amiyah Patterson is the one who reads Calla faster than Calla reads herself. What begins as a triangle of appetites turns into a story about healing, because all three are carrying damage that surfaces exactly when intimacy starts to matter most. It is a polyamorous romance with a heavy BDSM register and an interest in what happens after the doors close rather than in the scene itself.
Content warning first, because I would want it myself: this is explicit, it is heavily BDSM, and it is a polyamorous romance where all three people are in it properly rather than one of them being a guest star. With that out of the way, what surprised me is how much therapy is in here. Calla's past is not a backstory so much as the engine of the book, and Barnes writes the aftermath of intimacy with more care than the heat, which is not what I expected from a series known for being filthy. I listened to this over a long weekend and the twelve hours went by without a single stretch where I wanted to skip ahead, which for a book this spicy is a real compliment.
The pairing at the centre is the reason it works. James is a man who wants to kneel for a woman who has never allowed herself to need anyone, and Amiyah is the one who makes both of them behave like adults, and the dynamic between the three of them is negotiated out loud instead of assumed, which I appreciated more than I can say. Wesleigh Siobhan and Lawrence Baldwin give the two central voices a calm authority that keeps the book from tipping into melodrama, and the production never rushes the quiet parts.
Calla is the character I will remember. A chief executive who spends her nights as a dominatrix could be a one-note fantasy, and Barnes gives her an interior life that makes the double life make sense: the control is not a kink she discovered, it is a defence she built. There is a scene late in the book where she admits something out loud that she has been avoiding for hours and it landed for me harder than any of the explicit passages.
My criticism is about proportion, and it is one that listeners of the series keep making: the balance between heat and plot tips too far toward heat. A listener on StoryGraph said they could have done with less spice and more plot, and more of these three getting to know each other outside sex and shared trauma, and I agree with the shape of that complaint even though I enjoyed what was there. A second review put it more bluntly and said the plot is right there at the author's fingertips but the characters are not fleshed out enough to carry it. I would not go that far, and I did not struggle to stay connected the way another listener did, but there is a stretch in the middle third where the story stops advancing and the book simply repeats the tension it has already established. Twelve hours is a lot of time to spend circling.
It is worth saying that the series rewards reading in order, and that this third volume is the one that spends the most time on recovery rather than discovery, which is a different pleasure. If you have read the first two and come here for a third helping of the same dynamic, you will get it with interest. If you are starting out, do not, and go back to the beginning of Winston Hills rather than meeting Calla in the middle of her story.
The narration is the last argument in its favour. Two voices handling a three-person relationship can go badly, and here the handovers are clean and nobody is performing a caricature. Twelve hours and forty-three minutes is a commitment and it is the right length for a book that wants to spend time in bed and in therapy in roughly equal measure.
If you want the first volume of this world, Enigma is where the Winston Hills series starts, and it introduces the town and the people Calla keeps crossing paths with here.
Ascension is the third book of Winston Hills: Calla Black runs a company by day and a dungeon by night as The Black Dahlia, and her carefully controlled existence is upended by James, who wants to submit to her, and Amiyah, who sees straight through her. A polyamorous romance with a strong BDSM register and an unusual amount of attention paid to healing. 12 hrs and 43 mins, read by Wesleigh Siobhan and Lawrence Baldwin.
It is explicit and it is not the place to start the series, so treat this as a recommendation for listeners who already know the world. With the free listening trial you spend the credit on whichever title you like, this one included, and you can cancel in a couple of clicks if the register is not what you want in your ears on the train.
Whatever you pick up during the trial stays in your library afterwards, even if you stop, so a twelve hour book is a fair way to spend it. Playback speed, a sleep timer and resuming exactly where you left off all come as standard. All that is left is to press play and find out who ends up in charge, which is not a question with an obvious answer here.
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