Full Review by user_1bb8b69
Angst, fury, and a grovel that will break you, this is hockey romance at its most devastatingly brilliant! 🏒🖤
Seven years. That’s how long Ivy has carried the night Gabriel Castellano ruined everything, her dream, her career, her belief in him. And he doesn’t even remember her. When he walks into her bar like he’s never seen her face before, she snaps, IPA straight down his six-hundred-dollar shirt, a surprise he won’t forget 💥🔥
But fate has a cruel sense of timing: his team just bought the sponsorship keeping her late father’s bar alive. Suddenly the man she’s spent years hating is everywhere, at her taps, in her space, slowly chipping away at the walls she built to protect herself. And Gabriel? He knows he’s missing something. He feels the weight of her hatred, and worse, he starts to realise he should know why 💙
This isn’t just enemies-to-lovers, it’s a reckoning. Ivy’s grief and anger are so raw, so justified; Gabriel’s slow, stunned realisation of what he’s forgotten and what he’s cost her? Searing. The grovel is legendary, hard, honest, and bloodied, because fixing seven years of silence and hurt isn’t quick or easy. Watching them untangle the truth, confront the past, and find their way back to each other? It hurts so good 🥹❤️
Slow-burn, high-angst perfection that proves the deepest love sometimes has to fight through the darkest memories first. The First Line series has started with a masterpiece, I’m utterly ruined and desperate for more ✨