There are a lot of reasons why I love the Black Light universe. I mean, hot and sexy adult quality time, great storylines, and a whole lot of authors who are writing in a shared world. Maren Smith is the latest author to give us a full-length novel in the BL world, with Fearless. This book is the 10th novel in the Black Light ‘verse, in about 18 months or so.
Fearless comes out of this year’s Roulette Redux. Kitty, the heroine of this story, wasn’t the main character in Maren’s story, but she was a good friend of Hadlee. The way that this one goes is that it picks up on that Valentine’s Day night, after Ethan and his Menagerie were ejected from Black Light.
Kitty and Hadlee, who was once called Piggy-girl, were both “owned” by Ethan. He’s one of those faux “doms” who think that they are gods. Basically, he was really charismatic, got the subs hooked on him, then he started fucking with their minds to turn them into his perfect little pets. Hadlee managed to escape some time ago, and decided to sign up for Roulette. She drew Noah’s name from the draw. Noah is an Aussie who is a champion whip master. He found that Gareth was into her and she was into Gareth, and well, go read the story.
Meanwhile, Ethan managed to get himself kicked out of the club because he was being Captain Douchebag, along with Kitty-girl, Pony-girl, and Puppy-girl. Kitty, being friends with Hadlee, knew that she was about to end up paying for the fact that Hadlee escaped. And she did. He beat the fucking shit out of her and then raped her. Then he left her outside, stark ass naked, after being beat the fuck up, in the middle of February outside of DC. After Kitty managed to drag herself inside, she decided that she was going to be like Hadlee, and escape. It took her a lot of work in her head to manage it, mostly to pysch herself up to it, but she ran. She ran to a phone booth and managed to call Hadlee and beg for help. Hadlee and Gareth came, picked her up, and took her into their home.
After a few weeks in which Ethan ruins Kitty’s life even more than he already had, Gareth decides that he needs to do whatever he can to help Kitty and to get her away from Ethan. So, he calls up his bud Noah, down in Australia, and asks if he can send this poor abused and traumatized woman his way. Noah says of course. He’ll see Ethan coming from miles away, so Kitty’ll be perfectly safe.
When Kitty finally gets to Australia, after like 27 hours of flying, Aus tries to kill her for the first time, but luckily, Noah is there to save her. Then he takes her out to his ranch, which is isolated and far from neighbors, and Kitty just assumes that he’s Australia’s version of Ethan wanting something from her.
After Maren’s story in Redux, I didn’t think that I could dislike Ethan any more than I already did, and we didn’t know much about him at that point. But then, Maren decided we needed to know more. And guess what? I found out that I really could hate him more. Maren created a completely unlikable and easily hatable character. I mean, I wanted to go kick him in the nuts so hard that he could wear them as earmuffs.
I felt so sorry for Kitty. She really broke my heart. I mean, Ethan did a helluva job on her, and it is hard to break out of that kind of gaslighting and brainfuckery. I mean, Ethan had rules and if she didn’t follow them, his punishment was harsh, and his rewards were few. When you know that you are going to get punished so harshly for any kind of fuckup, you work really, really hard to make the person in charge happy. And that’s exactly what Kitty did. You internalize those rules and even when you get to a safe place, you have a hard time getting away from them, because they were the only way you knew how to stay safe, so you are going to keep going back to those rules. There’s something I’ve heard over the years. That’s that it’s perfectly sane to be insane in an insane situation. And again, that’s so hard to deal with when you are out of the situation.
I really like Noah, a lot. He gets handed a terribly damaged woman and subbie. He could have just jumped in and tried to Dom her immediately or he could’ve completely ignored that part of her, but he spent time trying to think about what was best for Kitty and how he could help her. He didn’t just jump to immediately trying to stick his dick in her.
OK, is Noah making new kitty stuff for Kitty not the sweetest thing ever? I love that he helps her recapture that part of herself. I also love that he fucking punches Ethan. I hope the cops do terrible things to Ethan.
OK, go check out this one and all the Black Light stories. Happy reading!
In Between the Pages 