“A love story with teeth and claws. I dare you not to fall in love with Cillian Fitzpatrick.” – USA Today bestselling author, Parker S. Huntington
The Villain, an all-new twisted modern day Greek tragedy from USA Today and #1 Amazon bestselling author L.J. Shen is available now!
Cruel. Coldblooded. Hades in a Brioni suit.
Cillian Fitzpatrick has been dubbed every wicked thing on planet earth.
To the media, he is The Villain.
To me, he is the man who (reluctantly) saved my life.
Now I need him to do me another, small solid.
Bail me out of the mess my husband got me into.
What’s a hundred grand to one of the wealthiest men in America, anyway?
Only Cillian doesn’t hand out free favors.
The price for the money, it turns out, is my freedom.
Now I’m the eldest Fitzpatrick brother’s little toy.
To play, to mold, to break.
Too bad Cillian forgot one, tiny detail.
Persephone wasn’t only the goddess of spring; she was also the queen of death.
He thinks I’ll buckle under the weight of his mind games.
He is about to find out the most lethal poison is also the sweetest.
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Excerpt
I leaned against the doorframe, hands tucked in my front pockets, and observed. It took her three minutes to notice me. Another two to lift her jaw off the floor, straighten her spine, and turn scarlet. Our eyes met across the room, and that nagging murmur in my chest happened again.
Get that checked. If you drop dead from a heart attack at forty, you’ll have no one else to blame. She winced, looking like I physically slapped her.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick.”
“Miss Penrose.”
“Veitch,” she corrected, just to spite me.
“Not for long,” I noted dryly. “A word?”
“I know many. My favorite one right now is—leave.”
“You want to hear me out.” I cracked my knuckles. “Now say goodbye to your little friends.”
She looked back and forth between the kids and me, then turned and murmured something to the teacher next to her, and hurried my way, dunking her head down. “What are you doing here?”
She closed the door behind her, whisper-shouting.
I’ve been asking myself the same question since bailing on Keith and his snooze-fest speech. What the hell was I doing here?
The Villain is the second book in Shen’s Boston Belles series and can be read as a standalone, but I would highly recommend reading them in order to get the full scope of everything.
I was quite curious as to how Cillian’s story was going to develop. He’s crude and has no emotion, for anyone or anything. And Shen wrote him and his story extremely well.
And then we have Persephone. Holy hell was she a surprise for me. This girl was the perfect match for Cillian and none of us knew it.
Their story developed and played out so well; it gave me goosebumps at times. But I have to applaud Persephone and her personal growth through this whole story. She came into her own and truly showed everyone that you do not judge a book by it’s cover. Hot damn I love her.
There is a lot of tension and angst between Kill and Persephone. And good gracious is just oozes off the pages and I loved every single bit of it. I gobbled up this story like it was a Thanksgiving feast. I could not get enough of these two.
I need to applaud Shen for truly sticking to her characters and their characteristics. Cillian is a man who has no emotion – he is like a machine. He does not mad, angry, hurt, annoyed – nothing. He feels nothing. And yet, as the story moves along and Persephone challenges him and has him doing things that are totally out of character for him, you see the changes without them being too obvious.
I want to go on and on about so much, but I won’t. I do not want to give anything away (I feel as I already gave too much away). This book is addictive; once you start, you will have this burning need to finish it immediately.
I cannot wait to see what Shen brings us next in this series.
About L.J. Shen
L.J. Shen is a USA Today, Washington Post and Amazon #1 best-selling author of contemporary, New Adult and YA romance. Her books have been sold to twenty different countries.
She lives in California with her husband, son, cat and eccentric fashion choices, and enjoys good wine, bad reality TV shows and catching sun rays with her lazy cat.
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