God of Malice

The review

Killian Carson is charm on the surface and predator underneath, and everyone at his elite university buys the act except Glyndon King. She has never lived up to her powerful family's expectations, and the one time she sees Killian clearly, he decides that she belongs to him. God of Malice opens Rina Kent's Legacy of Gods series and is one of the most-searched dark romances on BookTok.

Kent's specialty is the hero who knows exactly what he is. Killian does not pretend to be good, does not apologize and treats Glyndon's resistance as an invitation. The book is a cat-and-mouse game set against a moody, wealthy campus, and the tension comes from Glyndon realizing that part of her likes being hunted.

Glyndon is not a passive heroine. She is an artist with a complicated relationship to her family and her own darkness, and much of the book is her fighting both Killian and the parts of herself that answer to him. The supporting cast, the children of characters from Kent's earlier series, sets up the rest of Legacy of Gods.

The heat: five peppers. It is explicit, frequent and built around chase, fear and blurred consent. Kent writes dark romance without a safety net, and this book is a prime example of why people search for it and why some readers bounce off it hard.

Know before you start: Rina Kent publishes her content warnings in the author's note at the front of her books rather than online, so we do not list them here. Read that note. The book is billed as a standalone within a connected series and ends with Killian and Glyndon together. If you liked Corrupt or Haunting Adeline, this lives in the same neighborhood, with a campus setting instead of a manor.

Read it if you want an unapologetic dark campus romance. Skip it if dub-con or a predatory hero is a hard no. It is the start of a long series, so you will have plenty more if it hooks you.