Release + Giveaway ➤ SACRIFICE BY N. ISABELLE BLANCO

Title: Sacrifice

Series: Sinister Fairy Tales Collection

Author: N. Isabelle Blanco

Genre: Dark Romance

Release Date: November 12, 2019

Releasing as part of the 2019 Sinister Fairy Tales Collection and part of the Dark Paranormal Ryze Series, but can be read as a Standalone!

Megara

We all know the story.

How it ended.

He survived and conquered each task.

Became the hero of all heroes.

And in the end he became a legend.

What no one told you is that I was there. I was helping him . . . and when he ascended, I was left behind to rot.

Herakles never knew I sold my soul for his success—he didn’t need to. Had I been enough on my own, he would’ve chosen to stay.

Instead, he rose to full glory.

I was dragged straight to Hades.

Beaten.

Violated.

Broken.

Eventually, mutated.

I lost track of him for nearly three millennia, but I’ve found him.

I will kill him.

He chose to become a god; I was forced to become a nightmare.

Now it’s time for us to meet again.

Herakles

I abandoned my family mere moments before the Greek pantheon fell.

‘Till this day the whispers accuse me.

Had I been there, perhaps they could’ve been saved.

But I no longer gave a fuck.

Funny how vanity can blind a male to what really matters.

It took less than a year on Olympus before I began searching for her again.

I never found her.

Now, two-in-a-half-thousand years later, here I am.

Alone.

Empty.

An immortal ghost, simply getting by.

I should’ve never left her.

The only thing I had was hoping the last of her mortal days, wherever she ended up, were happy . . .

Joke’s on me.

A darkened, twisted version of my female returns, demanding my head for every one of my sins.

And she shall have it.

But first, I’m saving her from her curse.

I’ll sacrifice every ounce of my sanity left to free her . . . right before I let her end me once and for all.

My Review

The epic worldbuilding, the plot, the deliciousness of the characters, the emotions, the subplots, the machinations at work that come from Blanco's beautifully twisted mind wove a story together that completely blew me away!! I've always loved Greek mythology and I'm very familiar with the story of Herakles and the contradicting factoids that have inspired so much of our literature and movies, so I was more than a little bit excited to see this author's take on such a legend. She not only brought him spectacularly to life, she depicted his every strength, triumph, weakness, flaw and imperfection with the right amount of humanity (although he's a god) and made him into a character I couldn't help but fall in love with. Herakles was fighting a battle on multiple fronts: he's got two gods fighting for dominance inside of him and he's got a shrew of a first love hating him with every breath he takes. Tasked with taking out the very beings he already sent to Hades, he's got his hands full trying to stay alive while his partner, his love, his everything, wants to kill him every step of the way.

I’ll sacrifice every ounce of my sanity left to free her . . . right before I let her end me once and for all.

Despite how much I utterly disliked Meg and her theatrics when it came to how she felt towards Kles, his character alone sold this story for me. He was the end all to be all and I was his willing slave! Where Kles was everything macho and masculine and methodical and mouthwathering, Meg came across as a shrew, a harridan, a harpy, and yet she was hot AF! She annoyed the heck out of me because her vitriol took up way too much of this story, but I found myself living for every moment of the interaction between these characters. I swear, Blanco knows just how to get me to sweat the small details and there was plenty to gobble up in this go-round. I didn't get why Kles was completely to blame for Meg's circumstances and I'm not down with people not owning up to their responsibilities or the part they play in their own destruction, but it made for some great entertainment.

Honestly, as a standalone and for those who haven't read any of these books before, this is a thrilling introduction to the Ryze series. However, I would still recommend reading the rest of the series to get a complete grasp of everything that was going on. That's just my opinion though. I'm absolutely in love with this world and its characters and I encourage everyone to learn more about them. Oh what a tangled web Blanco weaves!!

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N. Isabelle Blanco is the Amazon Bestselling Author of the Allure Series, the Need Series with K.I.Lynn, and many others. At the age of three, due to an odd fascination with studying her mother’s handwriting, she began to read and write. By the time she’d reached kindergarten, she had an extensive vocabulary and her obsession with words began to bleed into every aspect of her life.

That is, until coffee came a long and took over everything else.

Nowadays, N. spends most of her days surviving the crazy New York rush and arguing with her characters every ten minutes or so, all in the hopes of one day getting them under control.