5 "All that matters is that we're lost together" Stars 
 I have so much to say about this book, that I'm sure I'm going to be rambling throughout this review, so I apologize in advance. This was just an Amazing read for me. So let's start... 
 I can see why most of the reader's that read and reviewed this book did not like it or Clarissa, but I have to say she was fascinating, engrossing, and strong willed and I loved her journey. 
 Clarissa Leigh Van Zandt is living a life of promiscuity trying to fill a void within her-self, and roaming the city of Crow as a vagabond. Her darkness can only see light and relief through the one-night-stands she chooses and the pain they are willing to give in order to reach a euphoric contempt, and feel the love she is looking to feel deep within. Broken and lost is what Leigh is, but she is also unselfish and unyielding after her past made her and the future she now leads. So she escapes the life she never wanted only to leave behind the one thing in her life that was the only good to come out of it and live the life she always wanted, even though it may not be full of glamour. 
 "I was afraid...of the inevitable monotony of it all." 
 "This wasn't love. She'd had love once, and she'd run away from it because it wasn't the kind of love she wanted. Wasn't the kind of she'd dreamed about in wordless whispers, formless ideas in the back of her mind. Just a deep tugging feeling, as if someone had tied a string to her heart and was always pulling, pulling, ever pulling her toward something she didn't know but would recognize when she saw it." 
 Leigh has a friendship of sorts with an older bar owner named Gary, who helps her with some cash for the small work that she does around the bar and helps her with a place to crash and hide her belongings. Gary sends her to pick up his car from a garage where she meets Gabriel. (Leigh doesn't know his name at this time.) Gabriel is a broody, serious, good looking, ex-military man who served in the Afghan war. When they both meet the relationship between them is anything but civil. Leigh begins to hate the man, with the way he speaks to her even if those conversations are few and none she despises the man. And the way her body reacts to him was something she wasn't expecting, and didn't want, but neither were his looks and the icy stare that held the same pain she saw in her own reflection. 
 "Gabriel. Like the archangel, fallen to earth. Leigh swallowed thickly and looked down. A name. And she never forgot names. Names gave people weight, life, substance. Meaning, when she wanted everything to be meaningless." 
 Their relationship starts with truths concealed, and stories behind their pasts that haunt them still. The pains they both share are different in their own ways, but they can only achieve the same balance in normality through the pain they inflict and take. Leigh with her tainted body seeks sex as an addiction to feel anything in her life where her past was confined to do and feel what other told her to. 
 "Her tainted dirty defiled little body that needed sex like an addiction, that wanted to take her hate out on him with raking nails while he punished her with vicious thrusts and filled her until she split apart... because unless it hurt it wasn't real enough." 
 "Do you think I'm disgusted by your sexuality, Leigh?" 
 "You act like you are. You treat me like you are." 
 "No," he repeated. His gaze fell to her lips. Something wild darkened in his eyes, roughened the edges of his voice. "You make me want to hurt you... Until you beg for more." 
 Gabriel has his own set of issues and demons that plague his life and we know more about them once the story sets its pace and grows more with both characters, but through it all, you must understand that these two people connect on a level because they have the same understanding in what it feels like to be in pain and knowing that life isn't always full of their expectations, or wants that reality hands out. The cards have been dealt for their life and it's up to them to up the game or fold. 
 The choices that Leigh makes might not always be the correct ones, but they are the right ones in the moments she makes them and the people she contemplates about. She gives her actions up freely without remorse, and sacrifice. It's the beauty in it that makes this story what it became. And makes Leigh that more heroic in her doings. 
 And in the end, the choice she made have might not been the right one, but she makes it on her own, with her consequence in order, the outcome is better than what she had dealt with before, but at least they are hers to call her own. Her mistakes, her choices, her rights, her victories, and her falls. 
 I completely loved every second of this story. Cole McCade, your words are so detailed that they painted the most beautiful images in my head while I was engrossed in this story. Thank you for making these perfectly broken, perfectly imperfect characters and their journey.