Do You Want to Know a Secret?

(please note, I am about to spoil the hell out of this book)

Dom is the third book in the Alliance series by SJ Tilly. The first two books in the Alliance series introduce two besties, Nero and King,  just hanging out and doing crimes together in the Twin Cities. King comes from a wealthy family and has two sisters, and his much younger half-sister, Valentine, is the heroine of book 3.

I was pretty interested in this book as a reading experience right from the jump. Having read all the previous book in the series, I noticed right away that this one doing something different. Every other book had dual narrators, but this one starts with Val’s point of view and stays there. But the table of contents is also a big spoiler: later in the book, there were lots of chapters from Dom’s point of view. There might be other reasons for this kind of narrative disparity, but the simplest answer is usually the correct one— I assumed right away that this man either lying to Val or keeping a secret.

The Set Up & the Reveal: The book opens in an airport. Val has just bumped into a hot Chicago businessman named Dominic Gonzales. She dropped her cookie and her backpack strap gave out, and Dom insists on replacing both. Although Val doesn’t consider herself lucky, she ends up getting bumped into first class and sitting next to Dom on her flight back to Minneapolis. They have spectacular chemistry, a great conversation, and sex in a lactation pod on the concourse after they land. Over the next 4-6 weeks, they continue to text. Val is smitten, but also has suffered too many devastating emotional losses in her life to believe they have any kind of real future. 

At the 20% mark, the end of chapter 6, there’s a text exchange. Val is headed to Vegas for a last minute bachelorette party with some work friends.

Chapter 7 is the first one from Dom’s POV and it’s a scant handful of paragraphs. Dom gets off the couch and sends orders to have his jet readied for “wheels up in thirty.” The destination: Vegas. This is the first confirmation readers have that Dom is up to no good. He told her he was already in Vegas, but now we know that he’s chasing her there. After this, things happen quickly. They meet for dinner and cocktails, they got very drunk, and in the morning they wake up married. They fly back to Minnesota to get her things and tell her family about the marriage.

At the end of Act 1, literally at the 30% mark, the secret is finally revealed. They arrive at King’s house, and her brother has an immediate visceral reaction to Dom’s presence. Dom is the head of the Chicago mafia, and he tricked Val into marriage to force his way into the Alliance. Val has been the victim of an elaborate catfishing scheme.

King and Dom bark and growl at each other; their macho posturing escalates into pushing and shoving. But Val is still narrating, keeping the reader tightly focus on her feelings. She starts putting other pieces together: the entire thing, all the way back to their first meeting, was a manipulation. It’s not that they were drunk in Vegas, only she was. She blames herself rather than Dom—castigating herself as broken and a fool, so pathetically desperate to believe that a man like Dom could be interested in her. Val embraces numbness, her only coping strategy for managing her broken heart.

But why, tho? The choice to suppress Dom’s point of view is interesting. It’s difficult to argue that it’s integral to the plot or an effective plot device. The Chicago Mafia has been suffering losses from an unknown foe. His ostensible reason for wanting to join the Alliance is to access their resources and firepower, to find out who’s behind the attacks and to get help vanquishing them. But he marries Val the second week in November and then moves her to Chicago. Whatever urgency drove him to rush into marriage is put on hold for six weeks and the next 60% of the book. They don’t see King and Nero until December, when Dom finally outlines what he needs from The Alliance. The languishing mystery comes back online only at the very end. Dom discovers it was a distant Gonzales cousin behind the killings. Is it fun to watch Dom, Nero, and King go down to Colombia and rough the bad guy up? Sure, I guess. But it’s never all that clear why Dom needed the Alliance to help him figure that out.

The payoff of Dom’s subterfuge is at the reveal, but even then, it’s worth unpacking. In a movie with a truly surprising twist, the ones I never saw coming—that kid has been talking to dead people! Kevin Costner really was a spy! It was Keyser Soze all along!— the joy is the way my brain immediately raced backwards, searching out the subterfuge and misdirections. How did I miss it? Why didn’t I see it all along? Seeing the movie again was always a fun exercise in close viewing. Once I knew the secret, it felt as clearly forecasted as a weather alert-pre gutting of the NOAA. 

That’s just not the case here. We’re shut out of Dom’s perspective and they aren’t together on page. There’s not enough information to put it together. Tilly wants readers to be surprised and to find out alongside Val. We all know that romance is about feelings. So how does the reveal works on an emotional level? Would this scene have been less powerful if readers had been a party to Dom’s scheming?

The only way to answer that is to think about how the reader’s experience would be different if we had access to Dom’s point of view in between the airport meeting and the Vegas wedding. 

Tilly doesn’t need to protect Dom. In fact, as soon as they leave King’s house, we see Dom escalating his villainous misdeeds in his own point of view. He arranges to tamper with Val’s birth control, and we discover that she wasn’t just drunk in Vegas, he roofied her. (If it matters to you, drugging her was to earn her compliance with the wedding, they don’t have sex until she’s sober.) An open secret: romance readers will forgive the worst, most reprehensible behavior from an MMC. It’s this unfortunate truth that makes dark romance possible. You’ve got books out here where a woman ends up with her bully, her stalker, her rapist. This only works if authors know that readers will forgive anything that man does if he’s hot, rich, looks good in a henley, and feels his behavior is justified. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯   

I think Tilly’s end goal was to keep readers invested in Val. If readers knew that Dom was tricking her, they might have deemed her TSTL, or too stupid to live. Instead of judging him for lying, readers are likely to judge her for being oblivious. It’s even possible that readers might have decided that she didn’t deserve him: How can Val be a mafia queen if she can’t even see what kind of shenanigans her man was up to? But if Tilly could keep readers mostly in the dark up until the reveal, then hopefully their primary reaction to Val would be empathy rather than judgment. It’s a good gamble, and one that is largely effective. Tilly manages to catapult readers into Act 2 thinking Val is sad, but not pathetic.

Unfortunately, the emotional catharsis of that moment—readers sharing Val’s heartbreak and blaming Dom— gets squandered and fast. At its core, the book is a capitulation narrative for the heroine in a way that Nero (the first book in the series) was not. In Nero, Payton was truly in a miserable emotional state, living her life in fear. When Nero comes along, he sees that she's stunted and frees her from that cage, one that was made by the verbal abuse and neglect she suffered as a kid. The life Payton was going to live with Nero freed her from that smaller life she was living. She couldn't see a way out, and he saved her.

In Dom, it's really quite the opposite, in a way that I found truly sinister. He used her own feelings against her to trap her into marriage, without knowing what she was doing or her real value to him (access to her brother's crime syndicate). And then, for the rest of the book, he essentially shows her how nice the cage he built for her. And because she is less miserable and alone than she was, she decides to be happy there. He gets what he wants, while she thinks, “Our relationship was built on lies and deception. And I already half hate myself for how easily I’ve just pushed that all aside simply because I want to make this work. Because I want to be with Dominic.” 

Heartbreaking, indeed.