God of Pain

God of Pain is a 2022 dark contemporary romance by Rina Kent, published as a 436-page paperback by Blackthorn Books.

The narrator is a mafia princess who has grown up knowing that her marriage or her allegiance will be arranged for her. Instead of keeping to that, she wants Creighton King, who is presented as bad news dressed well, and the novel is built on the distance between the life she has been assigned and the man she has chosen. The opening admits that the choice was a mistake before explaining what it was. The confession comes first and the explanation second, which is the shape of the whole book: the narrator tells the reader that her fate was decided for her and that she reached for the wrong man anyway.

The book is a college-set new-adult romance with a dark edge, which is the form that made Kent's titles popular through online readership rather than through print distribution first. It works through a first-person narrator who is candid about her own errors, and the mafia background supplies the pressure that keeps the relationship from being private.