I have to admit that I wasn't too sure about Rafael at first, the way he was so willing to mark Falon even knowing it would cost her her life didn't give me warm feelings towards him! He comes across as quite arrogant and seems to believe that Falon is beneath him just because she is human. Even though he knows she is innocent and doesn't deserve to end up caught in his argument with his brother he seems quite willing to let her pay the ultimate price. I didn't think the author would be able to make me like him but she definitely proved me wrong and by the end of the story I was routing for him and Falon to work things out and be able to stay together. The more you see of Rafael the more you see how hard things have been for him, he feels a great responsibility to his pack and thinks that he has let them down by not taking a mate sooner but at the same time he hates the idea of allowing Lucien to take someone's life out of a misguided sense of revenge. Rafael feels he has been harshly judged by the Blood Law when the woman he killed was a Slayer and as it is forbidden for a Lycan to take a Slayer as their mate he feels that Lucian was the one in the wrong. At the same time he has to deal with the pressures of the ever increasing Slayer threat while his Pack is becoming weaker thanks to the divide between him and Lucien so he really is under a lot of strain. He hides his worries and fear under a tough as nails outer shell but once you look past that you can see what a caring man he really is inside.