Book Review: Committed

Title: Committed
Author: Penelope Sky
Genre: Romance, Dark Romance, Fiction

What It’s About: 2 Months Later—Hades waits with Maddox for the distributor that they will meet that has contacts in the Middle East. He watches Maddox play with the man, threatening him with violence as the man protests that he is not able to get any drugs in. He thinks about Sofia, who has divorced him, left behind her ring, and moved to Rome with her mother and their unborn son, Andrew, as it leaves him pretty miserable. Hades then talks to the man and the distributor agrees to try to get the drugs into the country, while eyeing Maddox as a madman. In another meeting that Maddox has with Hades a day later, he tells Hades that he wants to cut Damien out because he find him useful. Hades tells him that Damien stays but Maddox tells him that he will not pay him as much, to which Hades tells Maddox that it’s fine, as he will give Damien a portion of his own cut of profits to make up for the loss that Damien will take. Hades resents Maddox for being the reason why he lost Sofia and Andrew from his life, but he wouldn’t risk them and he cannot find a way out of the partnership with Maddox.

Sofia works in the Tuscan Rose in Rome, where she works closely with Antonio, the manager of the place. But despite the difference and the divorce, she still misses Hades. So she calls him and asks him if he would visit Rome for the baby’s appointment. He agrees to do so and they go to the doctor’s office but there is no conversation, or very limited conversation and it is tense. He is, however, happy to see the baby on the ultrasound, and Sofia can tell that he is happy. When Hades drops her off at her home, Sofia tries to talk to him, and then she kisses him, but he pushes her away by telling her that he cannot do this. Ash, Hades’s brother, calls Hades and tells him that he has seen Sofia talking to the manager of the Tuscan Rose, and that he is a good looking man. The manager had in fact asked Sofia out but she turned him down because she is still in love with Hades, and he told her that he wouldn’t mind waiting for whenever she is ready. She’s flattered and surprised that someone would even want her while she is pregnant.

The next time Hades comes over to meet Sofia for the baby’s appointment, he goes to her office, and runs into the manager talking to her, so he looks pissed off at him. He takes her to the appointment, and the baby is doing well—once again, he becomes animated when the ultrasound comes up. Then he drops Sofia off at her place, but this time she pulls him into her house and they end up having sex. He leaves the next morning, having slept the night over, feeling like shit because he really wants to be with Sofia but she made the decision to leave. He’s not happy about the idea of his mother in law catching them on their way out in the morning. Things with Maddox aren’t going well at all, because Maddox has been trying to provoke him into attempting to kill him. In one instance, Maddox tells him that they’re very much alike because Hades had killed his father while Maddox had killed his mother. In another instance, Hades has a go at him, but then Damien stops him from fighting Maddox more, so Hades spits at his shoe, only for Maddox to wipe the spit and suck on it. That freaks Hades out so much, because he doesn’t understand Maddox’s obsession with him, that he ends up sitting down in his office at one point with a gun, and considering taking his own life because he doesn’t see a way out. He doesn’t actually go through with it only because Sofia calls him.

In one of her calls, she had asked if he would come and spend time with her leading up to Andrew’s birth. He does come to Rome, after telling Maddox that he’ll be on leave for two weeks, and at first stays in the hotel down the street, but Sofia convinces him to move into her house for the two weeks so that he can get closer to the baby. They sleep together in the same bed, and he feels the baby moving around. She also shows him Andrew’s nursery, and Maria is happy that Hades is back. He’s there when the water breaks in bed, and takes them to the hospital, spending time with her and the baby while she recovers. When he returns from the hospital with Sofia and Andrew to the house, he helps out as best as he can, but he struggles. He struggles with his feelings for Sofia, and the fact that she will remarry someday, so he won’t have her. He struggles with not being a father to his son, and the idea that Andrew will grow up with a different man as his father, because Hades is so far away—maybe seeing him once or twice a year, if he’s lucky. He’s with Andrew one morning when Maddox calls and he knows that it’s time to go back, but he cannot deal with this heartbreak, so he promises Maddox he’ll be in the next morning, and tells Andrew goodbye. He then packs up and tells Sofia that he is never coming back again, and that he doesn’t want to see his son grow up with a different man as a father. Sofia calls him a coward for running away from them, even though they’re divorced and it was her choice.

When Hades is back in Florence, a few days later he gets a call from Sofia where she yells full out on him, saying that she left to protect their child and herself, that she’s miserable without him and would much rather be with him but that he won’t do anything about Maddox to make sure that their family is safe. He doesn’t say anything, but he goes back to Marrakech, to the Gypsy, and asks her to help him forget Sofia—the first option that she had offered him—and to forget his feelings for her.

Sofia speaks with Ash, introducing Andrew to him, and he is smitten with the baby. She calls Hades a coward in front of Ash, and he reminds her that she was the one that left Hades, which hurt him beyond comparison after he had put his life on the line for her before. Ash tells her that Hades is not willing to do anything against Maddox because it would hurt her and Andrew if he fails, including reminding her that her son would be killed and she would be raped. Sofia takes some time to think about it and realizes that the issue is that Hades can’t be the one who kills him because Maddox is fixated on him with that, but there is nothing against her killing him. She talks to Ash again, telling him that she wants Hades back and wants to kill Maddox. At first, he doesn’t know what to do with it, but he agrees to help her. He comes up with a plan and walks her through it, that he believes has a chance of working in her favor. She is afraid to do it and leave Andrew motherless, but she knows that she will have her family back if she does. Failure would also mean her death potentially, and Andrew’s, so she decides to leave the boy with Ash while she follows through with the plan.

Maddox invites Hades to his house in the Tuscan countryside for dinner, saying that since they’re partners, they should know where the other lives. Hades arrives for dinner, and quickly starts feeling terrified by Maddox’s obsession. It becomes quickly clear to him that Maddox’s obsession with him is dangerous, and recognizes the fact that this is how women must feel when someone is obsessive about them. While Hades does navigate Maddox’s dinner safely, he realizes that Maddox’s insinuation about the two of them being together is going to lead to him being forced to have sex with Maddox. And it’s not what he wants, he’s disgusted by it but he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Sofia returns to the Tuscan Rose in Florence, and quickly notices the wilted flowers, the higher amount of criminal presence, which she isn’t happy about, but she ignores it as it is not her focus. Instead, she heads to her old office, which hasn’t been touched in the months since her departure, and waits for a while. Just as she’s about to give up, she hears the heavy steps, and Maddox walks through the door asking her what she is doing in town. Before he’s really able to finish the sentence, she uses the gun in her jacket pocket and shoots him twice in the body, and the last time in the head. Hotel Employees come to check out what is going on, with some of them throwing up, and others offering to help her call the police, but she tells them that she has it covered. Instead, she calls Hades, and tells him that Maddox is dead. He cannot believe it but comes running to the hotel and confirms that Maddox is gone. He feels relieved but is shocked at the fact that Sofia was the one who did this. He takes care of it, and when he sees Damien, he gets angry at Damien because he believes that Damien was the one who put her up to it.

Later, Sofia visits him at his house, but he is cold, telling her that he doesn’t want her, and that they’re done. He yells at her that she was the one who left him, not once, but twice—counting the time that she said no to his first marriage proposal. She tries to fight for him, but he tells her to get out. So she goes and talks to Ash, telling him that Hades is cold, which is odd because a month prior, he was in love with her, but now he’s acting like he’s not. Ash comes over to talk to Hades, finding him in a bar with women around, and Hades still gives him the cold shoulder, which confuses Ash. Sofia decides to move back to Florence with her mom and child because she wants to be closer to Hades and make things happen. She talks to Damien about it, and he tells her to act the way that she did when Hades fell in love with her the first time. When Damien sees Hades, he drops the hint that Sofia won’t be on the market for very long, and when Hades doesn’t make any inclination of interest, he tells Hades that he will consider asking her out then. This annoys Hades, but he doesn’t do anything about it.

Sofia comes over to drop off Andrew at Hades’s apartment, but she is dressed up and ready to go out. When she calls Hades three days later to pick up Andrew, he says “yeah” as a response, so she hangs up on him, a couple of times before he changes how he responds to her when picking up the phone from her. She picks up Andrew, cooing at him and then heads home, after telling him in anger that Damien wasn’t the one who helped her, it was Ash who helped her get Maddox. On a different day, Damien calls her to ask her if she has any plans, and tells her that Hades will be at a club/ bar meeting with some of his clients and she listens to his plan. Hades is at the bar meeting with two of his clients, who end up picking up some girls. He gets a girl sitting next to him, but he notices Sofia in the crowd by the bar, talking to different men. It bothers him when he sees how many drinks she had gotten, and as time goes on, she continues to talk to different men, laughing and having a good time. At some point, he has enough of watching her talk to one man in particular and drops the girl he’s with to go talk to Sofia. They get into a mini-argument about her being able to do whatever she wants since Hades doesn’t have any say in her personal life, and then she heads out when he presses her about more information, claiming that he’s bothering her. He follows her out and they continue arguing with each other outside, until he claims her by kissing her, and takes her behind a dumpster in an alleyway, dropping her underwear somewhere. After the sex, she walks off as if nothing happened.

The next day, she drops Andrew off, and tells Hades off again about asking her personal life because he asks her where she is going as she makes her way down the stairs. She uses the same language that he used on her when he’d pick up her phone calls, and comments, “It’s annoying, isn’t it?” He continues to press her on where she is going—and truthfully, she has no plans to go anywhere or be with anyone, she had just dressed up to make Hades jealous—and she makes up a story that she is seeing someone involved in businesses that sounds exactly like Damien. Hades asks her to stay the night with them, and she does after pretending to call someone to reschedule their date. They have a nice and quiet time, focusing on Andrew. The next day, Hades goes to Damien’s office, and asks him if he is seeing Sofia, to which Damien refuses to answer. Hades looses his temper and turns over Damien’s desk, destroying his computer, before Damien admits that he is not dating Sofia. Hades is relieved, but he has to buy Damien a new computer.

Sofia spends the night over with Hades, and they had fallen asleep after sex, but when he wakes up in the middle of the night and tells her to go home, she tells him that she’s not leaving until morning, and she will fuck him first. She follows through on her promise. That one night turns into a couple of nights a week, and eventually they have a conversation where she asks him to give her a second chance to prove it to him. Hades does, and has her apologize on her knees, sucking him off. Eventually, Sofia reveals that all of the things that she had done and said to him over the last few months since she returned from Rome were ploys to get Hades to feel something and get him back. She confirms she was never with Damien and she never saw any other guys. Hades asks her and her mother to move back in with him, but tells her that they won’t remarry. Sofia accepts whatever he is willing to give, at whatever timelines he is willing to go.

Hades meets with Ash, and Ash congratulates him on getting back together before asking him when the wedding is going to happen. Hades says it’s not going to happen any time soon, but Ash asks that if he knows it will happen sooner or later, why not make it happen sooner, and then adds that it means that Hades will have to leave the business. Hades doesn’t reply to the marriage part but asks Ash to clarify about the business, to which Ash explains that the drug business is the reason why their family had suffered so much. Hades doesn’t like what he hears, but a few days later, he tells Sofia that he is out of the drug business. She is surprised because she wasn’t expecting this, but she is also happy about it. Hades then goes and talks to Damien in their lab, and tells him that he is done with the business, as of that evening. Damien is surprised but also glad for him, though he would much rather have the two of them work together. Damien tries to see if Hades is willing to restore their friendship now that he’s out, but Hades continues to be cold towards him, and so Damien tells him to go get fucked, though he knows that he will have to continue working with Hades in the bank.

Hades and Sofia spend time together after dinner one night, and he says to her that before he asks her to marry him again, he has to tell her something. Sofia is surprised at the words because she wasn’t sure that she would hear him say that any time soon, but she agrees to listen him out. He tells her about the fortune from the gypsy in Marrakech, including the couple of times that he had visited her. She quickly puts together the fact that he was so pushy about them getting Ash’s forgiveness, and she believes him. She asks him if the gypsy really said that they will have another son, and he says yes. Sofia then tells him that the baby might be arriving sooner than they expected, and pulls out the pregnancy test that shows she is pregnant. In the end, Hades realizes that even if he had gotten rid of his feelings with whatever the gypsy had made him do, they were soulmates, and those feelings would always be there and would come back.

In the epilogue, Sofia and Hades walk around Marrakech, heading towards the gypsy fortune teller. They had gotten remarried so Sofia is happy to call him her husband again, and she is starting to show with her second child. They arrive at the tent of the gypsy, who tells Hades that this is likely the last time he will ever grace her tent, and then she calls Sofia by her name, which has Sofia surprised as she never shared her name with her. The gypsy asks Sofia if she really wants to know her fortune as it can be terrible to know one’s future. Sofia affirms that she does want to know it, saying that she knows that it will already be good. So the gypsy tells her that she will have two sons, will get daughters through marriage, and she will live a full life with Hades, but not an extremely long one because she will die two days after her husband from a broken heart. Sofia loves the fortune and is happy that she will not be without Hades.

My Thoughts: I love this happy ending for them both—I’ve fallen in love with these two characters, and I’m really happy with the fact that they ended up together. That said, there were a few things with this story that I felt like they could have been better written or better explained as the holes in the plot are blackhole wide gaps. For example, Sofia doesn’t seem to have any experience in using a fire arm—there hasn’t been any part of the story where Hades teaches her or she had learnt it; she hadn’t even been aware that it was part of the criminal underworld until halfway through book one—but yet she was able to aim perfectly to get Maddox through her pocket and kill him or at least down him long enough to kill him. I feel like that would be impossible to do even with someone who is unguarded in that moment as Maddox had been. I do wish that we learnt more about Hades’s feelings and actual thoughts when he saw his wife going around connecting his emotions so we could see that his hate was really his insecurity. I also would have loved to see Hades admit that he love her, and the second proposal. That said, I’m glad that with Hades, it wasn’t Sofia begging him to leave the business, but rather it was Ash who told him the facts of the matter, and Hades decided that it was enough for him. Either way, it’s a perfect end to the Hades’s and Sofia’s love story. Now I’m looking forward to seeing the two of them but with Damien falling in love in the next book in the series.