Reckless by Lauren Roberts is the second book in a now complete trilogy. Reckless starts with the ending of Powerless, as Paedyn runs away. With Kitt being crowned king, his first decree as king was for Kai, his enforcer, to find her with any means necessary. Meanwhile, Paedyn is collecting as much in a bag from her childhood home (one thing being her father’s diary that holds all his secrets) as she can because she knows she can’t stay there long.
Kai starts looking for Paedyn and begins at her childhood home, where she is. He and his officers look around her house, and she is hiding in the chimney. His officers are ready to leave, but Kai can tell she is there, so he lights the house on fire, forcing her to escape through the chimney. She then has to enter the “Schorches,” which is a big desert, because it is the only way to escape Kai and his officers. Paedyn’s trip across the scorches was terrible, as she was hallucinating due to dehydration and starvation.
Meanwhile, Kai and his officers are on horses, trying to find her. Paedyn gets to Dor (A town next to Ilya) and kills one of the guards at the border. She then hides for days with a scarf over her face to hide her appearance because all of Ilya is looking for her, and she then starts fighting in a ring against a bunch of other fighters anonymously for money. Kai continues to chase her, trying to find her, and he chases her into a sewer, and it slowly starts to fill up with water, and they are trying to escape.
They escape together, and it’s a beautiful moment, and then he tricks her by chaining them together by the ankles and throwing the key into the drain they climbed out of. Paedyn and Kai go through a bunch of stuff while being chained together. They wear baggy clothes and a piece of fabric around the chain so it doesn’t look obvious. They continue to go through a bunch, and then get to “the Sanctuary of souls,” which is like a cemetery, but it has been overrun by bandits, so no one goes there; they had to go there because they could not make the journey through the scorches again. The last person to be buried at the sanctuary of souls was the late queen of Ilya centuries ago. On Kai and Paedyn’s journey back to Ilya, they are stuck together, so they get to know each other so much more and fall in love with each other more and more every day. They are in a cave because it is raining outside, and she decides to read her father’s diary. And she learns a lot about her father, and then she starts having a mental breakdown because of how many people she’s killed and how much blood is on her hands. She asks Kai to cut off her hair because she hates how the blood feels in her hair. Kai and Paedyn make it to this poppy field that is next to Ilya, and they confess their love for each other, and Kai wants to run away so they can be together, and he doesn’t have to kill her but then the officers catch them and Kai has to act like he hates her. They get to the castle’s throne room, and Kitt and his “court” all watch, and they walk in, and everyone expects Kitt to demand she be killed, but there’s a twist: he says they are to be wed. That is the end of Reckless.
