ARC Review: ✩Rellik✩ by @TeresaMummert

Rellik Bentley is to die for.

He can have any woman he wants and they will do anything to be with him. He uses and abuses them like drugs and tosses them out with the trash. The only thing he gives a f*ck about is his music. That is, until Ella Lighten walks into his life and stumbles upon one of his darkest secrets. In the midst of doing damage control, he begins to obsess over the mysterious woman who wants absolutely nothing to do with him.
Rellik won’t take no for an answer.

The thing about sins is they don’t have to be your own to haunt you.

Did you read the book blurb? Did you get anything from it? No? Good! Because you won’t get much out of my review either. Though I do have to say that I had thought the book was not quite what the blurb hinted at…and not in a bad way.

If you like your books gritty, dark, and erotic, say hello to a series that you will obsess over. Or at least I’m hoping it will be a series, because if Teresa Mummert doesn’t give the rest of these boys a book, I just may cut a bitch.

Does the mirror lie, as you hold my hand?

Or do my secrets hide, conceal the man?

Because I can’t give you what you need.

My hands are dirty, baby, you’re so clean.

Falling for the wrong was your mistake.

Giving me your heart for me to break.

Rellik Bentley is fucked up. A past that haunts him to this very day, he’s not looking to be saved. He knows there’s no saving him. His soul is too black already.

Women do nothing for him except assuage a random urge. He’s not looking to give any of what he takes back, because he’s not looking for them to come back or stick around. Besides being in a fairly successful band doesn’t exactly leave him hurting for willing women…until the one woman that wants nothing to do with him.

Ella Lighten is hiding something. She’s also searching for something. Something that may put the demons from her past to rest. There’s just one problem, the man that she’s trying her damnedest to fight her attraction to, just may hold the key to all the answers she seeks. It’s not long before an unwilling attraction begins to turn into something much more and to burn much hotter…

His eyes met mine, challenging me. I didn’t fight against him. The control was his to have as long as he didn’t stop.

It took me a while to click all the puzzle pieces together, and when I did? Holy fucking shit. What a twisted web the author weaved. A fucked up and gritty as hell web. I have to admit that there were a few things that I found a little confusing about Elle and Rellik’s relationship in the beginning. At least the way it came together. I particularly had a tough time understanding (highlight to view spoiler)[how she could ask him to do what she did when she knew practically nothing about him. Or how he agreed considering he didn’t know that much more.] (end spoiler)However, taking into consideration how fucked up both of these characters were, perhaps there really didn’t need to be a logical reason. There was nothing simple or logical about either of their pasts, so I suppose it’s fitting.

It was a slow-motion car crash that I had no way of surviving. I would take her down with me, and she would willingly go. Something broken inside of both of us fit together, the jagged pieces piercing into the armor we wore against the world.

At the end of the day, I could sit here and try to pick apart this and that, but the bottom line is it didn’t matter to me at all whether anything made exact sense. I was completely and utterly sucked into the story from the very first page and it kept me turning the pages almost obsessively waiting to see what happens. Even now, days after finishing it I find myself thinking about it. So that deserves 4 stars for that alone.

Some people are born this way unable to control the urge. I was created. I became this on purpose. And it all led to you. Don’t you see that? You’re the butterfly. You flapped your wings, and the entire universe set us into motion. It was an unstoppable force.

Rellik and Ella, as fucked up as they were apart, somehow made perfect sense together. Both of them were broken in their own way. Though I imagined Rellik’s history being a tad different going by the blurb. If you had asked me in the first half, I’d tell you he was nothing like the blurb implied. But holy shit did that change in the second half. Ella, although fighting demons of her own was still a very strong heroine, all things considered. She wasn’t one of those woe-is-me type of women, which just made it that much better for me.

Bottom line is if you love your books gritty as fuck with a darker undercurrent and a whole lot of sexy, Rellik is definitely a book you want to read.

ARC courtesy of author in exchange for an honest review