He Announces It on Day One

Elsa arrives at Royal Elite School with a plan. Finish here, get into Cambridge, leave.

Aiden King looks at her once, in front of everyone, and states that he is going to destroy her.

He then spends two years doing exactly that, and the book skips most of it. When the story picks up properly, the campaign is established, the school has arranged itself around it, and Elsa has learned to survive being the designated target of the boy everyone else is afraid of.

What she has not learned is why. Neither has the reader. That question is the engine of the whole novel.

What It's About

Elsa remembers nothing of her childhood. Something happened, it was severe enough to take her memory with it, and the people who raised her have not filled in the gaps. Fragments arrive in dreams and in moments she cannot place, and Rina Kent doles them out at a pace calculated to keep you turning pages well past a sensible hour.

Aiden knows something. That is obvious from early on, and it recontextualises his cruelty without excusing it.

Around them is the Royal Elite ecosystem: a closed world of wealth, inherited power and social hierarchy, with Aiden at the top of it and a supporting cast of similarly titled young men who will each get their own book later. There are seven in the series. Aiden and Elsa's story takes the first three.

Single point of view, Elsa's throughout, which is a deliberate choice: you only know what she knows, and she knows very little.

What Works

The mystery is genuinely well constructed. Kent withholds competently. The amnesia device is usually a cheap trick and here it is the spine of the book, because the reader is inside Elsa's ignorance rather than watching it from outside.

Aiden is a properly written antagonist. Cold, methodical, thinking several moves ahead, and never charming in the way bully romance heroes usually are. He is not misunderstood. He is deliberate, and the book does not soften him to make him palatable.

The pacing is relentless. This is a book people report finishing in one sitting, and the reason is structural: every chapter ends with a reason to read the next one.

And Kent understands her own genre. The power dynamics, the reversals, the moments where Elsa pushes back and it costs her. Whatever you think of the premise, the execution is controlled.

Where It Struggles

Elsa is thin. This is the most common criticism and it is a fair one. For most of the novel she reacts rather than acts, and her defining trait is a refusal to understand Aiden that reads as stubbornness rather than principle. The book asks you to invest in a heroine who spends four hundred pages being acted upon.

The cliffhanger is severe. Deviant King does not end. It stops. Almost nothing is resolved, and the reveal that arrives in the final pages exists to send you directly to Steel Princess. If you are going to read this, have book two ready.

The school setting sits uneasily with the content. The characters are pupils at a school, aiming for university, and the book is explicit. Readers have flagged this, and it is worth knowing before you start rather than discovering it in chapter twelve. Rina Kent classifies the series as new adult, but the setting is a school and it reads like one.

And the central premise is the thing that divides people. A romance built on sustained, deliberate cruelty asks a great deal of the reader's goodwill. Some readers find the eventual explanation sufficient. Others find that no explanation could be. Both reactions are legitimate and you will probably know which camp you are in by chapter three.

The Velvet Coven Verdict

Deviant King is a well-built book with a premise that a significant portion of readers will refuse, and refusing it is not a failure of taste.

What Kent does properly is the mystery. The amnesia plot, the drip of fragments, the growing sense that Aiden's hatred has a shape you cannot see yet, all of it works. It is why the book gets finished in one sitting and why the series runs to seven volumes.

What she does not do is give Elsa enough to be interesting on her own terms. The heroine of a book this long should be more than the thing happening to her.

Three and a half out of five. Read it if bully romance is a register you already enjoy. Do not start it as your first dark romance, and do not start it without book two within reach.

Content note: Sustained bullying and psychological cruelty, dubious consent, stalking, violence, childhood trauma and its aftermath, explicit sexual content in a school setting. Ends on a severe cliffhanger.

Quick Reference

  • Author: Rina Kent
  • Published: 2019 (Blackthorn Books)
  • Series: Royal Elite, Book 1 of 7. Aiden and Elsa's arc runs through Book 3.
  • Setting: Royal Elite School, England
  • Tropes: Bully romance, enemies to lovers, amnesia, possessive antihero, ice queen and bad boy, single POV
  • Spice level: 5/5. Explicit
  • Status: On Kindle Unlimited. BookTok staple.