Rating: 4.5 stars
After his father died, Rafael "Rafe" Morales basically sold himself to TechCorps and agreed to become a technologically enhanced supersoldier, so he could make enough money to keep his widowed mother and younger siblings safe. He didn't really know what signing away his life would entail, and given the choice again, he probably would have chosen differently. He hasn't been able to see them for years, certainly not since he and his team, the Silver Devils, had to fake their own deaths to get away from their cruel superiors.
Unlike Rafe, Danijela "Dani" Volkova didn't really have external pressures that made her sign up with TechCorps. She was just curious and driven, and once their scientists had experimented sufficiently on her, she became super fast, agile, and graceful and lost the ability to feel pain, at all. This made her the perfect elite bodyguard for the rich and powerful, until she just couldn't handle the cruelty and corruption she was witness to and broke away. She joined Nina and Maya to become one of the mercenary librarians of Atlanta. Dani feels like TechCorps turned her into a monster. She appreciates the love that her chosen sisters and the former supersoldiers who share their lives offer her, but deep down she knows she doesn't deserve it.
Since their very first meeting, when Dani may have "accidentally" stabbed Rafe a little bit, the chemistry between them has been off the charts. But Rafael doesn't want a quick fling, Dani doesn't do long-term commitment, and neither is willing to risk screwing up their new big, unusual family unit with relationship drama. Keeping everything casual and platonic becomes a lot more difficult when the two have to go undercover among the rich and deplorable of Atlanta. After the death of Tobias Richter, the VP of Security for TechCorps, and the one who sat with most of the power, the organisation is desperately scrambling to maintain control, and our enhanced heroes and heroines have decided that it's time to start fighting back.
Having come into unexpected wealth at the end of the previous book, Maya is using all of her considerable resources and brains, her wealth of sensitive information burned into her brain after growing up in the loving arms of TechCorps and learning a lot of its dirty secrets, as well as calling in all the favours from her vast network of informants and allies. It's one such ally, a head researcher at TechCorps, whom Rafe and Dani are trying to contact when they go undercover, as a married couple. Once on the mission, they not only discover that Rafe's little sister is in terrible danger, but it also becomes impossible for them to keep their hands off each other.
This is the third and probably final (there is a suggestion at the end of the epilogue in this one that there may be new dangers facing our intrepid band of heroes, but it seems like the author duo has moved on to new projects now) novel in the Mercenary Librarians series. As such, it's not the best place to start. This might very well not be an almost five-star read to someone else but as the end chapter of all that has been established in the previous two books, with all the seeds sown and the principal cast, as well as the various supporting characters, joining together to launch a full-scale revolution, I loved this book. The romance between Dani and Rafe has been teased from the beginning and didn't disappoint.
Both Dani and Rafe got turned into lethal weapons by TechCorps, but Rafael grew up in a loving family and always knew that the sacrifices he made were for them. Dani was rejected by her parents once they realised the choices she had made, and was honed into a ruthless killing machine by the scientists. She is fiercely loyal and has vast capacities for love and emotion, all of which she is worthy of, but takes her quite some time to come to terms with.
I loved this book, and its action-packed and thrilling finale, where the downtrodden of Atlanta join with our protagonists to kick ass and take names, in order to secure a better future, free of the dominance of TechCorps and their controlling ways.
Judging a book by its cover: The cover for this one at least has slightly more of a sci-fi feel than the last one, but it's still a pretty generic image and I certainly would never have picked up this book from the cover alone.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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