 | Sweetly Unhinged (Devoted In Darkness #1) by Kira Cole ★★★★★ Read: June 28, 2026 418 pages |
I went into this expecting a dark rom-com. It's not. The cover is sweet and the premise sounds playful — golden retriever IT guy, anonymous hacker alter ego, his brother's ex-girlfriend accidentally sending him her darkest fantasies. Cute setup, right? It's not cute. It's a full-throttle dark romance wearing a flirty jacket, and honestly, I wasn't mad about it.
Violet is stuck. A boyfriend who games all the time and tells her she was asking for it when her boss tries to put his hands on her. A political internship that's slowly becoming a nightmare. Three years of burying the parts of herself that want more, want darker, want anything other than the nothing she's been living in. So when she drunkenly emails a mysterious hacker vigilante and pours out every fantasy she's been sitting on — it doesn't feel reckless. It feels inevitable. She was always going to reach for something. The question was just who would be on the other end.
Cade is the kind of hero I will follow into moral grey areas all day long. He's protective in the way that actually costs something — not grand gestures for show, but the quiet, immediate kind. Someone threatens her? He doesn't talk about it. He handles it. Before she asks, before she knows, sometimes before she wakes up. He's a man of action first and words second, and every single time he showed up for her, I felt it.
But here's where it gets complicated. He knows who she is. She doesn't know who he is. And every layer of deception he builds — and he builds many — is another brick between her and the one thing she actually deserves: the choice. He gives her full control inside the fantasy and none over the emotional reality she's living in. I wasn't angry at him. I understood every reason he had. I just wished he'd trusted her enough to play it differently.
The spice is dark, deliberate, and well-built. The tension between what she wants and who she thinks she's getting it from does a lot of the heavy lifting. Without spoiling anything, this book goes places. The villain escalation is real and genuinely unsettling — not cartoonish, not over-the-top, but the kind that makes your stomach drop because you recognize how it works.
My one complaint: when the truth finally lands, and it lands hard, the emotional fallout doesn't get enough room. I wanted the mess. I wanted her fury to breathe. The reconciliation earns itself in its own way, but the book rushes past the ugly middle to get there, and that middle is where the real trust gets rebuilt. I needed more of it.
That cliffhanger, though. I physically cannot talk about it without spoiling everything, but I'll say this — I picked up book two immediately, and I never do that. Never. That should tell you everything.
Tropes: stalker romance · secret identity · obsessive MMC · forbidden (brother's ex) · age gap · CNC · he fell first · dual POV · protective hero
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