Reader's Discretion Advised

Hmm... I'd say probably more of a 3.5. I rather liked the premise and what the story has is well-worked, but if you scrutinize it, a lot of things seem decidedly...odd.The thing where Marcello actually loved Enzo...that actually made a lot of sense, so while it did seem a bit weird, I let that go. What really bothered me was that Enzo just...forgave him. I'd have expected him to be more vengeful. Like, "Yeah, sure, you love me, but you hurt my family. You hurt me. Die, bitch." I just felt like it was kind of OOC for him to suddenly be all "you deserved better" and give him a merciful death. (I mean, he hadn't seen Kirith yet, but at the very least, he saw Laura's trauma and what the bastard did to that Chase kid. I just think he should have been more ragingly angry.)And when Kirith regained him memories... It was all pretty good until it got to that point. It's like he had a spontaneous complete recovery, and then extreme relapse. And the melodrama. I mean, as soon as they said he still couldn't remember, I already knew that Landon would be the "trigger." The "big reveal" was just...weird...imo. Granted, I've never been or been around trauma victims, so I can't entirely say that what happened is unrealistic, but something about it just rang false to me...And I am truly tired of the "but he tainted me"/"I'm dirty; how could you still want me?" even though I do understand the sentiment. Actually, it would have been weird if it hadn't been there. I'm just saying, though...I also did rather like that Landon acknowledged that things couldn't be exactly the same as they were before (I can only stand so much idealism).The early characterization of Landon seemed weird to me also. It seemed like Owens wanted to make it one of those typical "I hate you but I fell in love with you anyway" hostage stories, but then would realize that that didn't fit Landon's character and tried to work with that instead.I like the way she revealed why Kirith killed his father. I thought that was well worked and didn't seem like either info dump for the sake of info dump or a contrived circumstance for the sake of info dump.Overall, not a bad story. Well-written. It flowed nicely, which is always exciting, even if parts of the characterization seemed off. I'll be generous and round it up to a 4 because there were little - if any - grammatical/punctuation errors.