Why You'll Love This
He believes loving someone is an act of violence — and the book makes you terrifyingly understand why.
- Great if you want: a brooding, emotionally complex hero wrestling with inherited darkness
- The experience: slow-burn and emotionally tense — dread and longing in equal measure
- The writing: Regnery writes internal conflict with aching specificity and restraint
- Skip if: you find trauma-as-identity heroes frustrating rather than compelling
About This Book
Some wounds aren't chosen — they're inherited. Cassidy Porter has spent his adult life in deliberate isolation, convinced that the evil running through his father's veins runs through his own. It's a logical, devastating conclusion for the child of a serial killer to reach, and he's built his entire existence around protecting the world from himself. Then Brynn Cadogan arrives, and Cassidy's carefully constructed solitude begins to crack. Regnery places her story at the intersection of nature versus nurture, shame versus desire, and asks whether a person can truly outrun their own origin — or whether love might be the thing that finally stops them from trying.
What distinguishes this novel as a reading experience is Regnery's gift for interiority. Cassidy's first-person voice is measured and aching, the prose carrying the particular weight of a man who has rehearsed his own unworthiness so thoroughly he can barely recognize tenderness when it reaches him. The pacing is patient in the best way — this is a romance that earns its emotional payoff through accumulation rather than spectacle. Readers who respond to character-driven stories built on psychological complexity and quietly devastating vulnerability will find this one lingers.