Rina Kent’s God of Fury (2023) is a dark M/M (male/male) romance and the fifth installment in the best-selling Legacy of Gods series of interconnected standalone novels. A New York Times bestseller, the book is Kent’s first M/M romance and is set in the fictional world of rival elite universities, where powerful families and secret clubs dominate social life. The narrative is built around the popular enemies-to-lovers trope, featuring two protagonists with opposing personalities: one disciplined and repressed, the other impulsive and violent. As a prominent author in the dark-romance subgenre, Kent is known for writing anti-hero protagonists and exploring psychologically intense relationships. This genre context is central to the novel, which uses its high-stakes, often confrontational romance to explore how trust can develop from a foundation of hostility.

The novel follows Brandon King, a reserved art student whose life of rigid control is upended when he’s drawn into the violent world of a rival university’s secret club. There, he clashes with Nikolai Sokolov, a chaotic and dangerous Mafia heir, and their initial animosity evolves into an obsessive relationship that forces Brandon to confront his deepest secrets. God of Fury explores themes including The Danger of Repressing Trauma, as both characters must face their pasts to move forward. The narrative also examines the possibility of Building Trust and Connection Through Self-Acceptance and Healing as a Group Project in a world where violence and inherited power are constant pressures.

This guide refers to the 2025 Sourcebooks Bloom Books edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, graphic violence, sexual violence and harassment, child sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, mental illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, antigay bias, substance use, sexual content, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Brandon King is a 23-year-old master’s student and lacrosse captain at Royal Elite University on Brighton Island, England. He reluctantly attends the Heathens’ initiation ceremony, wearing a numbered white rabbit mask, after receiving a threatening text warning that his twin brother, Landon King, will be harmed if he doesn’t appear. The Heathens are the dominant club at the rival King’s University, led by Russian organized crime prince Jeremy Volkov and his closest associate, Nikolai Sokolov, also 19 and an heir to the Russian crime syndicate Bratva. During the initiation’s predator-and-prey game, Nikolai corners Brandon in the forest and pins him to the ground. He then holds him captive in an annex building. There, Brandon learns that Nikolai invented the threat about Landon to lure him to the event. The encounter ends with Brandon fleeing, but not before Nikolai deliberately presses his lips to Brandon’s jaw and throat, leaving two hickeys and unsettling Brandon’s carefully ordered life.

Brandon keeps his depression and undisclosed traumatic memories at bay as he manages through a rigid daily routine: a 5:30 am run every morning, precise painting hours, and afternoon tea. He doesn’t experience sexual desire and privately identifies as asexual, but he fears being seen as different from the norm and keeps a girlfriend named Clara as social camouflage, tolerating her infidelities. He sometimes engages in self-harm, and he hides three shallow self-inflicted cuts on his wrist beneath a thick watch band. Nikolai, who’s openly bisexual and accustomed to casual encounters, finds that his sexual interest has fixed entirely on Brandon and that he can’t pursue anyone else. He begins appearing on Brandon’s morning-run route, pulling out Brandon’s AirPods, sending long stream-of-consciousness texts at all hours, and following Brandon’s Instagram. Brandon refuses every approach with cold formality and repeats that he’s straight. Nikolai gives him the nickname “Lotus Flower” and declines to accept any dismissal.

The situation escalates over several weeks. Nikolai texts Brandon a photo of Clara touching him in his penthouse apartment, along with a threat to send proof of the encounter to others, and Brandon arrives at the apartment in a jealous fury. He pulls Clara away by the hair and orders her to leave. When Nikolai pins him against the door, Brandon stops resisting, and the two men spend the night together at the penthouse for the first time. In the days that follow, Brandon insists that the encounter was a drunken accident and that he’s straight. He also ends his relationship with Clara, telling her only that he cheated. Privately, he recognizes that he has never been attracted to her.

Brandon and Nikolai enter a secret arrangement centered on the penthouse, which Nikolai has kept unknown to everyone else. Brandon sets strict conditions: No one can know, they will not appear together in public, and the relationship is purely physical. Nikolai agrees to these terms while privately planning to dismantle them. Over the following weeks, the two develop a domestic intimacy beyond the physical. Nikolai watches Agatha Christie adaptations with Brandon, buys Italian pastries in bulk rather than cooking, and stays nearby while Brandon paints. Brandon cooks elaborate meals, changes the sheets, and puts Nikolai to bed when he falls asleep on the bathroom floor. Nikolai’s habit of falling asleep on the floor has roots in his unnamed mental-health condition, which has produced manic episodes since adolescence, leaving him unable to sleep in a bed during those periods. His episodes involve racing thoughts, violent impulses, and insomnia, and he manages them through fighting, breath-holding meditation in the bathtub, and psychiatric medication that he dislikes because it flattens his personality. He finds that Brandon’s presence steadies him in a way nothing else does.

Landon kidnaps Nikolai and holds him in the Elites’ basement as bait to draw Jeremy into a confrontation connected to his cousin Creighton King’s pursuit of revenge over a family secret. Brandon cuts the power to the basement cameras, steals the key from Landon’s room, and attempts to free Nikolai with a knife before Creighton knocks him unconscious. When both Brandon and Nikolai are removed from the scene injured, the episode deepens the hostility between Nikolai and the King family, particularly Landon.

The secret relationship reaches a breaking point through two connected crises. First, Nikolai learns that Brandon has been hiding the fact that Mia, Nikolai’s younger sister, has been sleeping with Landon, the person Nikolai most despises. At Mia’s birthday party, Nikolai confronts Landon and accidentally strikes Brandon across the face while swinging at his brother. Brandon punches Nikolai in return and announces that they’re finished. A long silence follows. Brandon texts Nikolai dozens of times, and Nikolai reads every message but can’t respond because his manic state has worsened to the point where he doesn’t trust himself near others. He attends a fight and nearly beats another man to death before regaining enough equilibrium to act. He eventually drives to the Elites’ mansion in the middle of the night. Brandon, who has been unable to sleep and has been checking Nikolai’s social media compulsively, comes outside immediately. Nikolai pins him against a tree and demands that Brandon admit he can’t stay away. Brandon, without deflection for the first time, says aloud that he cannot. Nikolai sets a new condition: No more leaving after sex, and no more hiding. Brandon agrees.

Brandon comes out to his sister, Glyn, and his friends Cecily, Remi, and Ava and then travels with Nikolai to his parents’ home in London. He introduces Nikolai to his mother, Astrid, a renowned artist, and his father, Levi, a composed and protective man who slowly warms up to Nikolai. Brandon tells both parents that he’s gay and identifies himself as likely demisexual, meaning that he experiences sexual desire only for someone he has come to love. His parents are immediately supportive of his sexual identity, though Levi is initially reluctant to accept Nikolai specifically. During that same visit, at a dinner attended by Astrid’s long-standing agent, Grace Bruckner, Brandon falls into a dissociative episode in the studio. Upon arriving home, Nikolai witnesses the episode and removes Brandon’s watch, discovering the self-harm scars on his wrist for the first time. Brandon explains that self-harm has been his way of managing an unbearable internal feeling and that Nikolai’s presence is the only thing that relieves it.

The following evening, Grace sends Nikolai a video. The footage shows Brandon at approximately 15 years old telling Grace that he feels overshadowed by his twin brother. Grace, who had been grooming Brandon through private art lessons, uses his insecurity to coerce him into sex while he repeatedly says no and tries to pull away. Nikolai smashes a glass in his hand while watching the footage. When Brandon walks into the studio and hears the audio, he picks up a shard of glass and cuts his own neck in a suicide attempt. He then collapses against Nikolai before losing consciousness. Nikolai holds pressure on the wound and then waits with him through a seven-hour emergency surgery that repairs a nicked carotid artery. When Brandon wakes in the intensive-care unit, he tells his parents and sister what Grace did, receives their grief without blaming himself for the first time, and says aloud that he needs help.

Nikolai and Landon work together to locate Grace at her apartment. With help from Nikolai’s father, Kyle Hunter, a professional assassin, Nikolai and Landon force Grace to write a full confession of the grooming and assault before they kill her, staging the death as a suicide with the confession as the apparent explanation. Brandon’s family uses the confession to have Grace stripped of her position on the arts council, her peerage title, and her standing in the field.

Brandon enters therapy and stays in close contact with his family during recovery. Nikolai works with his psychiatrist on a newer medication that controls his manic episodes without the flattening effects of earlier treatments. The two men move into the penthouse together and divide their time between Brighton Island and London. Brandon returns to making art, producing hundreds of sketches and paintings of Nikolai, and wins a major art award at a ceremony in London. At that ceremony, he kisses Nikolai in front of the assembled crowd without hesitation.

Two years after Brandon’s hospitalization, on the evening of the award ceremony, Brandon leads Nikolai into his childhood home studio and reveals a large canvas depicting the two of them on the night of the initiation as Brandon remembers it: not a humiliation but a moment of curiosity and promise. He then proposes on one knee, producing two engraved rings. Nikolai accepts immediately, drops to his knees in return, and kisses him. The inside of Brandon’s ring reads “N X B” with a lotus flower, and Brandon’s tattoo over his heart reads “Niko’s Lotus Flower” (588), placed in the same location where Nikolai had earlier tattooed “Property of B. King” (501). The novel closes with both men on their knees in front of the painting that depicts where they began.