Brutal Beauty In Dark Romance

Some stories don’t flinch. God of Fury is one of them—and we’re going there with care, clarity, and a lot of heart. We unpack how Rena Kent threads self-harm, sexual assault, depression, and mania into a dark romance that still earns its HEA, and why that balance can feel like oxygen for readers who crave honesty without hopelessness.

We start with Bran’s world of ritual and restraint, where a 5 a.m. run and a perfect smile keep the “black ink” at bay. That metaphor becomes our guide to dissociation, avoidance, and the moment a shaving nick turns into a coping system that looks like control but eats away at life. Then we meet Nico’s “red mist,” a manic surge he burns off in underground fights, and we explore how two opposite storms can stabilize each other without turning love into treatment. Research, curiosity, and presence matter; so do boundaries.

When the assault resurfaces in the worst possible way, the spiral is fast and devastating. We trace the fallout with care, through glass on the floor and a hospital room where survival opens space for the most important line in the book: “I need help.” From there, we talk therapy, agency, and why the happy ending lands—because it’s built on naming pain, seeking support, and choosing a future together. Along the way, we reflect on why dark romance can be a comfort read: the promise that even when a story gets brutal, it doesn’t leave you there.

If you value candid conversations about mental health, trauma, and the complex ways love shows up, you’ll feel at home here. Listen, share with a friend who needs careful company, and if our work resonates, follow, rate, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

Check out our Bookshop.com book store where you can get your own copy of the books we are covering!  https://bookshop.org/shop/wreckedbyfiction

Transcript

Trigger Warning And Setup

Emma 0:00

I'm gonna give a trigger warning for this episode before I get started. God of Fury is brutal. And we're gonna talk suicidal ideation and severe mental health disorders and psychotic disorders and medication, and we're gonna talk about suicide attempts. If that's not for you, skip this one and you can always come back. Welcome to the Wrecked by Fiction podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

That's not a cover reading. Yes, it is.

Emma 0:30

Did I read it on my lunch break?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Yeah. I made I made notes because I didn't know if there was gonna be a quiz.

Why God Of Fury Stands Out

Bran’s Control And Mask

The Black Ink Metaphor

Self-Harm As Coping

Nico’s Research And Support

The Assault Reveal

The Video And Spiral

Suicide Attempt And Aftermath

Red Mist Versus Black Ink

Art, Episodes, And Agency

Surgery, Survival, And Asking For Help

Emma 0:36

Hey, everything is for a grade while I was watching a movie with my six-year-old. Yeah. I didn't know I could be both right and so fucking wrong. Wrecked by fiction, where we read, cry, and question our emotional stability. Hey friends, Roshi and I are back. And today I wanted to talk to you about a uh Dark Romance series by Rena Kent. I am not the like president of the Rena Kent uh fan club. And if I had to choose one Rena Kent book to read over and over again, it would be this one. And it's from the uh ouch. Let's see. It's from the Legacy of Gods series. It's book number five, uh God of Fury. And the first time reading this book was probably almost two years ago, and I was new to MM romance. I wasn't new to dark romance, and obviously I had read every book up until this one in the series, but I hadn't read a lot of MM. And Nikolai and Brandon were like sweet little babies, and I fell in love with Nico his like need for attention and the way that he is so open with everyone and the way that he expresses himself is he's just like a big puppy. And Nico and Bran together is it was a journey for me to go on when I read it the first time. And I think that for me this book is just wholly about how different people experience and process their trauma and how they deal with their own mental illness. And I think too that maybe even the Legacy of God series altogether, that's a pretty common theme, is mental health and psychiatric disorders and things like that. Because there are other books in the series where we deal with like a narcissistic personality disorder and we deal with like antisocial disorders and things like that. And I loved those pieces in these books. But specifically, I made Roshi says hi. Lay down, buddy. I wanted to talk specifically about this book because the discussion of Bran and his experience with his mental illness is just brutal. And from the beginning, you can tell that Bran is suffering heavily, but he maintains control um and distance from other people by keeping his routine intact. And so you can see through Nico's point of view that you know Bran is up at five o'clock every single day and he goes running at 5 30, and he always smiles at people and he's never rude and he's never missing classes, and he does volunteer work, and Nico sees him really as this like perfect, I think he calls him like a posh. He calls him posh because Brandon is British, and he calls him Prince Charming and things like that. And Brandon is going through such an intense period of depression and anxiety, and instead of processing his trauma and dealing with the triggers, he uses the only coping mechanism that he has been able to figure out really, and that's avoidance. And he describes his own uh like list of symptoms as um black ink that covers him, and in parts of the book, Nico will s catch him standing in the middle of a room staring at his feet. Um, and that's because when you get Bran's point of view, you learn that he is watching this black ink cover his shoes and or shoot up and cover his shins or things like that. And I think that there is so much symbolism in the way that Brand describes his like list of symptoms. And one of the things he says is that he stands in front of a mirror and he can't look at himself because when he looks at himself, he doesn't see his face and he can't look himself in the eye because of his trauma and the way that he carries it, and he sees black ink instead of his face, and he has this kind of like I don't know, deep need for control, and because of that, you know, he only feels like he is surviving because he keeps a hold on that control, and when he starts to lose control, he gets anxious and he uses self-harm and self-destructive coping mechanisms like cutting and uh I view one of the things he does in the book is running, and he is like meticulous and in like kind of insane about it, and I view that as a form of self-harm because he's essentially he's exercising to failure, he's running every single day at the exact same time for the for the exact same time. And when he first starts cutting, he explains that he did it on accident at first. He like cut himself shaving or something, and he experienced this like sense of euphoria and a rush of relief. Like he could finally breathe when he saw his own blood like dripping down his neck, when he nicked it with a razor, and it escalates from there. And I think that that is as unfortunate as it is when you are someone who self-harms through cutting, that is kind of a universal feeling, and Brand describes it as um kind of bleeding out the pain, and so he can finally breathe, he can finally get his control back because he does this, and he has he wears like a wristwatch where um underneath it he has a bandage he wears all the time, and it covers kind of a spot that he opens and reopens and reopens over and over again. And the discussion on mental health and the way that Bran is processing his own trauma and how Rena Kent in this book describes the way that Bran feels and the that need for control is I know it's traumatic and I know that it's fucked up. Um, but I also think that it's beautiful because we don't like while we are now talking so much more about mental health, there is still this like level of shame and kind of taboo nature in discussing self-harm. And when in the book, when Nico finds out that Bran has been using self-harm, he does research and he is like reading like Reddit forums about um other people and the way that they can describe why they self-harm and like what it does for them. And he reads that, you know, it's a way to you don't have control over anything else in your life, and self-harm is a way is something that you can control. You're making the decision, the way that it goes is your decision. All of that is within your own control. And there is a piece of that with Nico where he is researching and you just realize like not everybody has that when they're going through something so traumatizing that self-harm is the coping mechanism that they turn to. Um and Nico in his best golden retriever energy way, he was trying to be there for Brian, but he doesn't know what's going on, he doesn't know the why of it, right? So he knows that it's happening and he is paying closer attention and he realizes that, you know, he kind of connects the dots. The razor nicks, the um cuts on his wrist, the bandages on his hands from like breaking a mirror and things like that. He can see now that Bran has been doing this all along, but he never knew it, or he never connected it altogether before now. And it is exposed towards the end of the book that Bran was sexually assaulted by an adult, um, his mother's art agent, and she recorded it. And Bran has been dealing with the after effects of feeling weak and not understanding why he didn't like it, and he doesn't like anyone, let alone women, and he describes himself up until meeting with and being with Nico as an ace or asexual person, and he was never he never enjoyed intimacy, and this woman took advantage of him because number one, she was an adult, and number two, because he was sad, and he wanted he was 15 years old at the time, and he wanted to be more like his brother, and he wanted to experience the things the way that other people do, and they have a dinner towards the end of the book where Nico and Bran are sitting with Bran's parents, and this woman is there because she's his mom's art agent, and she is you know pushing to become Bran's agent and be in his life more, and Bran asks Nico not to talk to her, and he's like, Yeah, I will, fine. And then he goes to the bathroom and he catches her in the hallway. He's like, So I lied, I'm gonna talk to her. And she is so rude, she like doesn't she tells Nico that she doesn't understand why Bran is attracted to him, and uh Nico says, Well, we're in a relationship, and she says, Oh, well, Bran doesn't do those. And he's like, What would you know about that? And then she says, Oh, well, I'll send you a goodbye gift. And, you know, 10 minutes later or whatever, he gets a text message to his phone that is a video of the assault. And at the moment that he gets that text, Bran is out, you know, down in another part of the house confronting her and telling her to leave them alone and never come anywhere near Nico or him again, or he is he is gonna tell people that you know it happened, and he's like in you get his internal monologue where he says, like, I would never do that. I'm not gonna tell anybody ever. Um, but she doesn't know that. And she should be afraid of me because I have this against her. And she leaves and Bran makes his way up to the studio where Nico is. Um, but when he opens the door, Nico is watching the clip that this woman had sent him. And when he pressed when Nico had originally pressed play on the clip, he had been holding a glass. And when he was watching it, he shattered it in his hand like he squeezed it so hard. And Bran walks in and sees what's going on and what he's watching, and he just he's he doesn't understand where the video came from, why Nico's watching it, and in his head, there's no way that Nico could still love him after seeing that happen to him, and seeing how in his mind how weak he was, and um, how he didn't fight. He might have screamed, he might, you know, whatever, but he is convinced in that moment that Nico is gonna walk away. And so he grabs the glass out of Nico's hands and he jams it into his neck. And you cut to where Nico is like holding pressure and trying to save Bran's life, and Bran is like, it doesn't hurt anymore, and he gets this it's not really relief that is expressed or that you feel from him from on the page, because he basically says, like, he's choking, he's drowning in the ink, it's covering him up, he's finally gone, been pulled all the way under. But you do get this sense of like him realizing that he doesn't have to fight it anymore. He finally did something about it. And throughout the book, you've gotten little pieces of brand's like suicidal ideation and his desire to not be alive anymore, and it is such a stark contrast to Nico and the way that um Nico suffers with his like manic episodes. He'll go into a state of mania for days or weeks at a time, and there's um Nico calls it the red mist. Um, and it's like uh there's violence, and the only way that he knows how to curb it is to like go into the fighting pits and or the clubs or whatever, and fight other people and use violence as a way to bring him back down. And the imagery there where Nico sees red and Bran sees black is carried throughout the book. And even so, when Bran would get stuck um in an episode where he's, you know, he's feeling the ink rise up his legs and cover his feet and things like that, he would be in his studio and he would be painting, but he would be in s like a fugue state almost where he would cover these whole canvases in like black like slashes and things like that. And knowing the loss of control and everything that he felt when he finally did like attempt to end his life, even though it's expressed in the book that he like as it was happening and he was bleeding out and he could hear Nico, but he couldn't really say anything back. And Nico is crying and saying, Please don't leave me, please don't leave me. Everything's gonna be okay, I promise. I'm not going anywhere. All of all of the things that you know a person who loves you says. Bran's like, I wish I hadn't done it. And yet you just read 400 pages where Bran is constantly telling the reader that he wishes he was dead and that he didn't have to deal with that anymore. And I think that his own journey is so separate from the journey that he has, like alongside Nico. There's their love story and the way that he grows to accept them and even coming out to his friends and his parents and everything like that. And then there's his journey with like recognizing that he needs help. And God of Fury has a hea. Bran is uh saved, he goes through life-saving surgery, and he wakes up and his vocal cords aren't even damaged, and he's left with a scar, but there is a moment at the end where they are in the hospital, and Bran looks at his parents and he says, I need help. I can't do it. I need help. And the piece there that's so powerful to me is that he very easily could have actually ended it all in that moment. There was really no reason for that attempt to not have been successful. And the fact that Bran and Nico get their happy ending, and they get to move forward and experience their life together, and there's, you know, an epilogue where they get engaged and they've moved, you know, full time into the penthouse that they had been sharing and agreeing to move from where they were attending university to the United States and things like that. There are so many bits of kind of this continuation for the two of them. Um and God of Fury is a comfort read for me, as fucked up as that may be, um, with the grief and the self-harm and the mania and all of the mental health struggles. Um reading about trauma is not traumatic for me. Right. So I I will cry and sob and I experience empathy alongside the characters, but I don't it doesn't leave me in pieces because they get better and they live to see more and experience more and be more and do more, and I think that could be seen as like my own little bit form of control. Um, because bad things happen in books that I read all the time, but they don't stay bad, they get better. And the love story between Nico and Bran is just filled with trauma and struggle and secrets, but they still found each other, and they still did everything that they could to be together in the end, and they, you know, changed pieces of their lives so that they fit together and they molded to the other's um world where it's necessary, and I just think that the vulnerability in this book is next level and in my opinion pretty unmatched um on my list of uh books. Maybe specifically MM books. There are a few that were the vulnerability is really high and just absolutely incredible, but God of Fairy for me is a five star read for sure. And I just I'll read it again. Almost guaranteed. I think this is the third time I've read it in two years. So keep doing what you're doing, Rena Kent. Good stuff. Remember that if there are Are things in your own life that you need help with. There are people around you that love you, and there's always somebody who is available to help, to talk to, and it's really important that you ask for help. So considering I'm thoroughly wrecked by fiction, I'll see you later. Wrecked by Fiction is recorded and produced by West House Productions. They handle all the audio, video, and post production so we get a clean sound, smooth edits, and zero tech headaches. Westhouse Productions aligns with podcasts, live music, and creative projects that want to sound professional without losing their edge.