Review: Facade (Deception #1) by Ker Dukey and D.H. Sidebottom

You meet someone. You date. You fall in love. You marry.
The four simple rules of love….
Wrong! I’m getting married but I’d never met him before now, never dated him, never fell in love. I have no access to the memories of the most magical time of anyone’s life.
My mind won’t allow me to evoke the past, I can’t remember those simple stages to lead me to the fourth .

I can’t comprehend why I would have ever wanted to marry someone like Dante. I should never have passed the first stage, although, I may have seen him through the eyes of the woman I once was, this me that lives, breathes here now, can’t understand how we made it to the next stage.
I’m not sure, without memories, how I know that this voice inside me, telling me I would never have chosen him, speaks some truth, I just know. He’s controlling, arrogant, callous and violent, and utterly hell bent on humiliating and degrading me – Like watching me falter, watching me struggle to comply and be the woman he asked to marry, powers him- as though he wants to break me piece by piece. Fiber by fiber. Until all that’s here is the shell he created from a soul that I once owned.

Now my memories are slowly returning. And they show me a completely different side to meeting him. Our dates, falling in love. The Dante haunting me in the shadows of my mind is loving, gentle and utterly enamored with me, nothing like the man with me now.
And this is what taunts me. My tender lover turned into a debauched, cruel sadist who is determined to consume my life, destroy my mind and murder my spirit.

I am, Star, and just like with some stars in the sky, the light you see is an echo, a façade, I am already gone
I am a no one.
Especially to him. To him I am the dark in his desires, the corrupt in his depravity.
The sin in his immorality.

1-Click on Amazon FaCade (Deception series Book 1)

Review

The story begins with Star finding herself abducted and without memories.  She doesn't know who she is, where she's from or how she was abducted. 

"I don't know what to do. I had no idea of what would happen to me, never mind what...what anything.  Dam  it! It was all jumbled heap of nothing in my head, a deep, chasm filled with swirls that wanted me to grab onto them but it couldn't reach.  Each memory was a spitting flash inside my mind that fizzled out when I thought I had grasped it."

Star is force to submit to Dante in order to survive.  Right from the beginning she feels a connection to Dante that she cannot explain.  An incident occurs that changes Star's course. Star is soon led to believe that she requested the abduction scene.  She struggles in believing that she would make that type of request.  

"He had a way of making me forget my questions. Forget the wrong in everything happening around me, to me. He made me feel responsible for taking away his apparently kinky and totally in love fiance."

Dante continues to dominate Star.  He works hard to hide the truth from her.  We learn a lot about Dante, including his underground dealings, his testing of a drug, and how and why Star was chosen.  In the end Star slowly begins to regain her memory and pieces the puzzle together.  

This is a dark and dangerous read! The facade that was created was ingenious. The twist at the end was not surprising but drew the story together.  In the end we learn the lack of honest can truly create darkness.