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elliepassmore · 3 months ago

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Rebel Witch review

5/5 stars Recommended if you like: fantasy, witchy reads, enemies to lovers, dual POV

Heartless Hunter review

Big thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was one of my most anticipated sequels of 2025 and it did not disappoint! For those like me who were worried about where (and with whom) Rune ended Heartless Hunter with, have no fear: she is perfectly aware it's a problem and has no plans to really stick around. That was honestly my biggest issue with book 1, so I'm glad Ciccarelli had a solution for it.

Gideon and Rune are once more on opposite sides, but now they have the added complication of their feelings for each other. Falling for Rune made a fool of Gideon, even if he turned her in in the end, and falling for Gideon nearly got Rune killed and did get someone killed. The two are a big bundle of conflicting emotions in this one, though Rune seems more willing to let things slide than Gideon does (to be fair, Gideon also thinks Rune wants to be with Cressida). Only one of them knows the full story.

I liked that Ciccarelli started the book with Rune and Gideon about to meet again after weeks/months apart rather than starting it with them separated and part of the plot being them finding each other again. Enemies to lovers works best when they're in proximity, and in proximity they are. That's not to say they get along though. The 'enemies' are back in full force, with Gideon being particularly prickly and ready to double-cross Rune the second he gets the chance. Despite that, the two are still familiar enough with each other that they work quite well together and are mostly able to scheme a way out of trouble.

With the Blood Guard still in charge and Cressida gathering an army, politics naturally comes into the conversation. The Blood Guard is clearly bad, indiscriminately torturing and killing witches simply for being witches. On the other hand, Cressida presided over a reign of terror with her sisters, allowing and even participating in the torturing and killing of non-magical people. So...both sides are bad, but at this point there's no alternate solution. I was definitely interested in reading Rune and Gideon talk their perspectives out since they both make valid points but also don't see a non-extremist solution. Other people join in on this conversation as well and I liked seeing what other characters had to say about things. In the end, I think they come up with a good solution that works for everyone.

Rune is stuck between a rock and a hard place when the book opens. She greatly dislikes Cressida, but she can't go home and she still wants to see witches free. She does get out of the situation, but is in deep trouble with Cressida as a result of it, leaving her with two enemies at her back. Rune definitely goes on a personal journey in this book, trying to stay true to what she wants while also remaining free and dealing with the trauma that is Cressida Roseblood (and Alex's death). She has some low points, but her loyalty to the people she loves as well as to witches as a whole is able to bring her around.

Gideon is back to being fully against witches (although admittedly I don't know if that ever stopped). He's on thin ice with the Blood Guard, so he's determined to prove that Rune isn't a weakness where he's concerned. She is obviously, so Gideon has to juggle keeping her safe while also steering clear of the Blood Guard and trying to figure out where his loyalties lie and what he really believes. I have to say, Gideon really comes through in this one. He fought in the Revolution because it was the right thing to do and he continued to be in the Blood Guard because he thought it was right. This can very easily lead to a rigid character who sticks to his guns even when proven wrong, but Ciccarelli wrote Gideon to be moral, not necessarily loyal. As evidence mounts that neither side is entirely correct, Gideon is able to shift his perspective and comes to understand that there's good and bad on both sides. I really liked seeing this shift in him and seeing him put his brain power and experience behind a new solution that benefits everyone.

We meet some new characters as well as some old ones. Harrow is back and we get to learn a little more about her background. I enjoyed her character and do wish we got to know her a little better since she's still pretty closed off. Laila is also back and I liked seeing her camaraderie with Gideon. She definitely doesn't understand his actions always, but she's loyal to him and trusts that he at least somewhat knows what he's doing. Seraphine is back as well and we get to learn more about the older witch as well as her relationship with Rune's grandmother. Seraphine definitely has some surprises up her sleeve and she proves to be a good ally.

Bart and Antonio are two new characters. Rune and Bart used to run in the same circles before things blew up in Heartless Hunter, and it seems Rune wasn't the only one keeping secrets. Bart ends up being much more serious and down-to-earth than Rune thought, his socialite persona just as fake as Rune's was. Antonio is Bart's lover as well as an ex-acolyte for the Cult of the Ancients. He's not a witch, but is just as much at risk as Rune is if anyone finds out. I really liked the dynamic between the four of them and wish we got more page time to see a deeper friendship develop (maybe a novella?).

Overall I greatly enjoyed this book and think it's the perfect sequel to Heartless Hunter. I wish it were longer, but that's only because I want to stay in this world for a longer period of time.

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1800titz · 1 month ago

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ᴋɪɴᴋᴛᴏʙᴇʀ — ᴅᴇɢʀᴀᴅᴀᴛɪᴏɴ & ᴘʀᴀɪꜱᴇ

KNEELING LAMIA | Witch hunter!Harry x Witch!reader

There's too much tension in this cat-and-mouse. Inevitably, it stretches too taut and snaps.

★18+

This is ᴋɴᴇᴇʟɪɴɢ ʟᴀᴍɪᴀ for the KINKTOBER projects. Witch x Witch hunter au.

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CONTENT/WARNINGS: enemies. p-in-v. degradation. praise. pussy slapping (light). dom/sub undertones. rough sex. bro is simply kind of an asshole, but it's in an attractive way imo.

WC: 3.7K

You hate him.

You hate him, you hate the grease in his derisory, lopsided smile, the one, two-tick at the corners of his mouth, like an omen on the hollow barrel of a cocked gun. The stupid white straightness of them, slick with spit and glimmering off the glowing oil lantern.

The soft humanness in his unchiseled eyes. When they’re narrowed into slits, the color is so soft, so delicate, that they don’t feel nearly as sharp as he intends. The preternatural juxtaposition of a human having eyes that are so mesmerizing is absurd— the pink-rimmed oil painting of his irises, mounted in white, under the tarp of his lashes (they’re long, dark, and cast shadows across the green sfumato). You can nearly find sunstones flecking like gold flakes wading the surface of a pool, if you look close enough.

But the bands are eroded now. Lacking. You always thought his eyes were like the moss speckling the grove in your back garden. Now, the vibrancy of it, crawling up the trunks, feels like a distant memory.

Smeared, pupils bleeding wide like spilled ink.

(You loathe the way his green reminds you of the malachite scattered across your window sill.)

You hate his hands, too. His fingers. The way they notch on reins, and the steel hilt of a gun. The way his pointer stretches across the metal trigger— click— and the way the aim is off. Misses. A bole eats the bullet, and you think, after so many tries, he has to not miss.

He has to not miss.

But he misses, and misses, and misses— the cat and mouse is an old, familiar game, but a fractured part of you thinks he misses on purpose. And you wonder who’s really the cat; when he’ll finally admit you’ve been filling his shoes out in the hunt, long before his time.

But you hate his hands most because of the way they touch you. The way they feel good. Pinching your bones in place, thumbprints carving into your skin.

Pressure points— he’s no good with a gun, but he’s good at finding pressure points, scoping them with his fingertips. Squeezing in.

You hate his teeth, because you hate him, and he hates you, and you want to sweep them off the floor when you fracture every little bone in the composite of his skull with your palms and shatter them out with your fingers. The way they chew into your nipples and stab a crushed squeak out of you.

(It’s the nature of the game— a double helix. Taijitu. Water and oil. You’re meant to despise each other, because dark has to exist to balance light. There has to be a villain in every story, otherwise the narrative collapses—)

You can’t stand the way his stupidly fat cock splits you on him, around him. The way when he groans, the way it starts as a hum between his ribs, and metastasizes into that yawning pry of his mouth, his soft lips.

(Conflict. Resolution. Recycle.)

His hand pawing at a handful of your breast, like kneading dough. Testing the heft when it shakes under the pressure of his hips slamming in wet squelches, sack slapping to your sticky cunt. The blunt of his nails scraping down your sides, prying in where your waist tapers, and wrapping the barbs of his fingers around, where the rungs sit at your back, to lug you against him in filthy, wet smacks. Again— again.

(Fuck, fuck, fuck—)

“—Fuck,” you mewl, scratching out at his temple, fingertips curling into the burnt umber tufts they can reach, pulling, tangling. Scraping. Your thumb grazes his cheekbone. He bites down on your nipple, instead, where he’s been rolling it between his teeth with his tongue, and grunts. It makes you squirm on the table and arch.

When he unlatches and lurches up to loom over you, he looks wild. Like an untamed beast— reminds you of the wolf that lingers by your doorstep— that you’ve lugged along into your kitchen. Let him splay you across the big, oak table that squeals and rattles under the punishing pace he’s set with his hips.

“Fuck— no,” Harry grunts, and slams your wrist down onto the table, beside your head, your stuttering pulse. Cuffed in his grip. Your fingers twitch. His throat bobs when he swallows.

The tip of his tongue flicks out, drags across his lips, and you think of a scenting serpent. He huffs.

“Ought to declaw you,” he muses, hunching over you, narrowed eyes oscillating from your nails to your face. Voice a husk that oozes condescension. As if you’re an animal— a feral cat that needs its talons extracted.

“Fuck you,” you spit, and the words— the petulant tone, the way your chest rattles when his cock throbs inside of you— are enough to crook the corners of his pink mouth. Wry. Acid across his lips, in the ridges between his teeth.

He sticks his thumb in your mouth, but not really; presses in against the flat of your front tooth when you bare your canines, squeezing at your cheeks. Pressure points— under the side of your mandible, beneath your cheekbone.

“Better watch that mouth,” he taunts. When his eyebrows climb, three ruckles seep across his forehead. Maybe evidence of how he means it, how firm his resolve is, but the way he tips his head down at you, it's goading—

Your chest rolls. “Fuck— you.”

And you get it. You do. Coexisting is an absurd, incompatible fantasy. Deluded, when you cup your teeth around the world and still feel hungry. It only stretches so wide before he’s under your teeth, too, and nobody wants to live in a hungry, sharp mouth. It’s a means of resource. Sanctum; I want sanctum, and you my friend, are preventing that like gum jammed into a lock on a gate.

This slow dance is called perfect, incongruous symbiosis, like a winter coat and the hot sun. You don’t fit together. You’ll never work— not in tandem.

It’s just that he doesn’t get that it’s the circle of life.

A snake and a mouse. That works. It’s unpleasant, but it doesn’t have to be watched.

But it’s ugly. You get the angry men with the pitchforks. You get him— vigilante, here to stab the head off the python with a wooden stick and wring his hands out after, like the hero he’ll be if he manages to tame the beast (glorified pest control— snub the snake in the backyard). You accepted a long time ago that all the little people would get mad that you were eating their little people.

Nasty, vicious thing in the back garden— get rid of it.

But hey— that’s life. The ugly, vicious wasp nest dangling off a poplar tree deserves to exist, too, because that’s the anomalous, hideous shape mother nature’s hand squeezed it into. And that’s, you think, the disconnect. The electrical cord spitting white-hot, fizzing sparks from where it’s been gnawed down the middle.

You swallow. His eyes are blade-sharp. So unco. Contemplating, calculating.

You get all that. What you can’t wrap your mind around is the untethered snap between you, like a bungee cord lugging you into a collision. It makes you feel feverish. The fracture in the foundation below you, every atom bred from this, predestined narrative. The sizzle beneath your skin— a charred brand in the shape of his kiss under the layers of your dermis— (a lowly mimicry of what lovemaking is, all teeth). It’s brutal. Sharp. A skirt of canines across your collarbone. A notch across the bone. A means to satiate, a compound of loathing, and pining, and the cozening haze of desire. The yearning curdled in the spiral of the communal pool of your animosity.

Because he smells like the rain rapping across your roof when you stand out with the door propped, sticking to the fireweed in rivulets under your porch steps. Like suede. Musk. The wilting coriander sprig on your altar. Your resolve is wicker snapping under his thumb. A melting glacier under the heavy heat dripping from his eyes. You don’t like it. You can’t get enough.

You tip your chin up and his thumb snags on the blunt edges, smushes into your lower lip. When his heavy cock slips out of you and slaps up against his belly, a whine prickles at the back of your mouth. You encase it with your throat like a dirty secret left to write on paper. You won’t whine for him. But he’s thick. His cock is stupidly fat, and it throbs like he can feel the encroaching emptiness between your legs for himself.

You won’t whine, but you feel hollow, and it makes your hips cant up involuntarily. Forward. To him— you hate that— but the stamp of his palm to your cunt makes your thought process crumble apart like notes plummeting off their bars on a sheet of music. A smack of skin on skin is the aria of your twisted affection stretching and collapsing.

It doesn’t hurt. Not really. There’s a dull pang that blooms there, under his touch, but it feels smothered under the white-hot lightning streak of shock that jolts your shoulders and sculpts your face. The mortified, blistering heat that spumes your cheeks when the whites of your eyes pool a little wider. You flounder up at him wordlessly.

Harry hums. It’s haughty, and mocking, and it makes something ripple in your underbelly. “Say that again, little girl?”

You swallow. Squirm. The pseudonym has something bristling in your chest. You’re not a little girl. This thicket has belonged to you for hundreds of years.

But the warm prickle between your thighs is an ugly, ugly paradox.

And you hate the way his hand is this humongous thing between your thighs, across your sex, swallowing your smarting cunt in the cup of his palm. The way he leaves it where it landed. His thumb stretched out and lingering in the crease between your mons and your tucked up thigh. You hate the way you drool slick against his fingers, the way your clit pulses under the heel of his hand. Your chest rolls.

His amusement is acidic. Patronization sloshes off his eyes and burns a hole right through the layer of your mettle when he cocks his head down at you, the way your hips hitch. His lips twist. “Oh you liked that, did you?”

Your face pinches. The corners of your lips curl down despite the way your empty pussy flutters under his skin.

“No."

He makes a sound. A hum that granulates into a rich chuckle, and his eyes flicker off your face, to his hand, and back, and back. Something brews in the depths under his lashes, you think— a sinkhole cratering into the ground beneath the canopy of the woods, driving the forest ground out into a void— watching the breadth of his hand envelop between your thighs. Maybe at the molten heat, or the way he can undeniably feel you clenching up. Throbbing. Against him. For him.

“Is that right? Look at that, mm— drippy, little pussy,” Harry tells you, voice hardly over a whisper. The words are a livewire zigzagging up your spine, riding the arches of the knobs, spilling something noxious and cloudy along your cerebrospinal fluid.

It goes straight to your head.

“Needy, little cunt. Bet you could cum just from me slapping it.”

His middle finger grazes your asshole. Your toes curl, you can’t even argue, despite the vitriol puddling on the back of your tongue like stagnant water. He tips his head. Smiles. The flash of teeth carves an ache into you that makes your bones ring.

“Aren’t you… just the sweetest thing when you’re put in your place,” Harry murmurs down at you, eyebrows climbing, and he’s— unctuous. A headache. The kind that clusters around the arch of your skull and squeezes taut like a bundle of rubber bands. Talking down to you like you’re a wily thing for him to put into a corner, once and for all. Like your demesne isn’t stamped in his soggy footprints, layer after layer, year after year.

You bare your teeth and jut your chin defiantly, but then he drags his thumb down along your pebbled clit, and it makes your shoulders wobble.

You used to cut hunters down like the loggers muscling in on your timber. Hatred was a pearl folded into your heart. A bead tucked into the soft, fleshy tissue between the little pockets of your ventricles, and it stung like a splinter in your gums.

You wear it in your chest like his name shaved into a rib. The perfect harmony of dysfunction. You don’t know why being under him kindles a flame. Just that it does. He’s live coal, and you crackle over what he gives you.

The moment of reticence between you has that shattering weight of your little truce, and you’re reminded of the plunge from the hillscape of your dignity.

Maybe it’s worse that you don’t mind.

His shoulders swell. You like the spit-slick rim of his mouth, the way the color is an insignia of your teeth making landfall.

“Are you gonna be a good girl?”

When he plants his hand beside your ear and stretches forward a little more, his cockhead slips across your clit. Hot, like a firebrand coated in sateen. You curl your fingers and realize your wrist is still pinned down. His eyes sway to it like he knows what you’re thinking, and his mouth twitches.

“Gonna keep your hands to yourself?” Harry purrs, grunting when you roll your chin away in scorn.

“Because—“ His finger prods onto your cheek. Then, two. Under your jaw, enough pressure to turn your head. “You know I love that wild shit. But, can’t have you fucking up my pretty face—“

The humor coagulating his tone tastes bitter when you breathe it from the air. Swallowing it down into your lungs where it ghosts with the subatomic heaviness of want. Your eyes flit. You hate him— you hate—

He grins down at you. Not quite. Close-lipped, eyes vats that shelter his dogma. The intensity of his seriousness. “Can’t do that,” he muses, but his tone is softer than his countenance.

You look away. And you don’t watch it, but he huffs, like he’s losing patience for your still-not-quite-subservience and lack of zeal. His nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath. Hums.

“Mm. Come on, doll. You know I don’t want you if you don’t want me,” he tells you, but his mouth crooks because he knows— he knows.

You blink up at him. His eyes burn down at you from the bridge of his nose, and it feels like you’ve been swaddled into a sudden, wet heatwave. The words would nearly be considerate if it wasn’t for the condescending undertow that spills under the vowels like an oil slick.

His pointer traces the corner of your mouth, brows furrowing as he tails the motion with his gaze. “Just you say the word.”

And despite the way you blister, something itching under your skin, you won’t. Your teeth are clenched, but you couldn’t pry them apart with pliers to turn him down, not with the fever spilling its way across you. You settle for contempt— let it set your face like a cast congealing, but he doesn’t chase the tail of your indignation with anything beyond mockery.

He stares back at you. Doesn’t let it wither, drowns in the deluge of your inkpools, mouth curling but-not-quite.

“No,” he sighs, after a beat of your lull— bereft of your protest— drawing his forefinger away and slinking it down the naked space of your sternum, then around your swollen nipple. You gnaw into your cheek. “You know what I think?”

“—I don’t care,” you pick your head up to hiss.

You expect to face something crumbling at the retort. Discipline. Retribution— to watch something clot inside of him the way it wads in your chest, caking gravity across his features because— need to be taught a lesson in respect. What did I say about watching that mouth?

But it flickers over him without a hitch. Slides off.

Instead, he doubles down, hunching back over you. “I think you love this cock too much. Don’t you? Got you wrapped around it, by now.”

The flame from your core licks up to flare at the apples of your cheeks. He breathes when he straightens out. Deep. Like the prelude to a sigh, and you wonder if the same burning kisses along the nooks of his lungs. You don’t say anything, and he pulls his hand back.

“That’s right,” Harry coos, cocking his head down at you, “Just a sweet, cockdrunk, little whore, by now.”

Your eyes narrow into thin slits. Dagger splits. The wobble in your voice is a swordblade. “Shut— up.”

He laughs. Laughs. This muted, soundless thing that manifests more in his shoulders, the jolt across their breadth. The crater beside a smile line. He shakes his head, and cups the root of his cock with his fist. Your eyes follow it. You swallow.

“Mm, no,” he muses, gaze pooling where the mushroomed ridges of his tip slide along your sopping rim, your puffy lips, your clit, “I think you like it. Gushing all over the table.”

Embarrassment ties its tendrils along the base of your throat. Cogon grass germinating and feathering out across your esophagus, until you’re choking on your spit. You grit your teeth. Your hips nudge up. Forward. He underscores the presumption by pulling the head of his cock back, and sundering the string of tacky slick that’d stretched between him and your seam.

“Makin’ a fucking mess with your messy, desperate pussy,” Harry tells you, pressing his index to his thumb and prying them apart for emphasis. Your slick shimmers in the light. “Look at you. There’s a fuckin’ puddle.”

Your face creases. Cheeks buzzing, white-hot. You feel yourself leaking down along the cleft of your ass, and your fingers itch. A thunderbolt streaks across when you recognize that your hand is still flat against the table. Just where he left it.

He aims his cock back against you, so thick in his palm, and murmurs, “You want it?”

You don’t know how you ended up here.

You do, but the motions between point A and B feel like a nebulous smear. Hands in motion. Fabric tangling across the floor. Teeth, and tongues, and bones, and claws.

(“Always liked an older woman,” you remember he told you, tongue prodding against the inside of his cheek. The hubris of a boy sewn into the shoulders of a man. The irony of your preternatural youth folded into his proposition as his eyes roamed across your face.)

(“So let’s put …this,” a motion between with a jutted finger, a murmur drizzled in allure, tucked like a secret into the shape of the night, “aside for a time-out, you and me.”)

You don’t know why you said yes. How. Why your body reacts like he’s a breath you need, whispering along your lungs. Why you let him unspool you over his fingers, his tongue, fucking into you like he was starving.

But you nod.

You nod, and he presses his weepy tip against your cunt, and it only takes a nudge for him to pry you open around him again. Enveloping him. Sloppy, little pussy pulsing over the tip like a frenetic heartbeat.

You turn your chin and bite into your own shoulder to stifle the mewl spiraling between your tonsils, and he groans. The sting is better the second-go, but the pressure of having your rim stretched taut anew doesn’t lose its edge. The ache settles in your underbelly. Flourishes in the molten geyser of your arousal.

“Oh, shit,” Harry hums, pasting his palm flat to your tummy, right over your navel. Like this, you can feel his fingertips under your heartbeat. Across it. Thrumming. His eyes glued to where you swallow up his cock.

He feeds his cock into you slow, but it feels incongruous. The pastiche of what you’re feeling is already enough to cloud your head into delirium— you want teeth. Tongues, bones, claws.

“Harder,” you grit, catching his eye when he stalls, hand braced across your waist. You resolve paints your words firm, “I can take it.”

For a moment, Harry stares down at you. The whiplash of pause morphing to taunt, like a seamless rebound, has your rim fluttering over his girth. “My, my. Aren’t we eager.”

“Just—“

Your cosm ripples around you when he drives his hips forward, and lugs you back, hips colliding with your skin in a smack. A horrible, wet sound when he crams his way in, wedging your fuss back into the depth of your stomach. It flings you off your rationale.

He shivers. “God, you’re slutty. Slutty pussy on a slutty witch.”

The pace he sets is brutal. Merciless. It caters to your complaint, and squashes it out under his thumb. Under the kiss of his tip to your womb. Deliriously, you think he’s going to spill his hot, thick load inside of you, and then what? Then, what?

It feels like he’s wringing you out between his hands, until all that’s left is a pool of want.

You hate the way he’s chiseled in a place for himself. A tern across your branches, nested in twine and spare filaments of organs that belong to you. A little sinew peeled off of your liver. A sliver off your lung. Maybe that’s why—

You suck in a tight breath and let it rattle the nest he’s built, when he hits something unfathomably deep inside of you. Plugged on his cock, there’s no way for you to smother your moans out. He batters in to the hilt, cupping you by the waist, and rocking you back onto him, over, and over, and over.

“I want this sweet pussy to cum around my cock,” he pants over you. A curl has flopped across his eye, and your ire is eclipsed by your yearning. The ball inside of you unspooling as if he’s peeling the layers of muscle on your heart back like an onion to temporarily pluck out the undiluted loathing. “Do you hear me?”

It’s a mindless motion— your fingers creeping to land over where you connect, where he’s splitting your gummy walls to what feels like their ceiling. But he bats your hands away, and rams into you until your mons is kissing the wiry bed of hair that’s smattered over his shaft.

“It’s gonna cum around my cock,” he grunts, “or it’s not gonna cum at all.”

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