Antonia Bernardin

Broken Fae is the 4th book in the Ruthless Boys of the Zodiac series by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti and was my 17th read of 2025.

You can read my review for previous books in the series here:

Book 1: Dark Fae

Book 2: Savage Fae

Book 3: Vicious Fae

Obviously I have reached a point where spoilers for the books earlier in this series are nearly impossible, so don’t read the below if you haven’t read book 3 yet.

Plot summary attempt

This book opens with the start of summer break and the aftermath of the Elsium mate bond happening between Elise and Leon. All her other kings won’t speak to her, believing this means that they’ve officially lost Elise forever but even though the Stars have made her choose, it doesn’t mean she no longer cares for the rest of them. She feels like she can’t tell Leon because she doesn’t want him to feel unworthy but since Leon has always been on board with sharing her with the other kings, he senses the gap in their world too and sets out to fix it.

Meanwhile Felix Oskura is escalating his attacks on both Dante and the Lunar Brotherhood, making Dante desperate enough to reach out to Rider and try to strike a deal that they work together to bring down Felix who is now being helped by the Black-card.

Rider and Gabriel strike up a kind of friendship as Rider tries to get him to use his fully awoken site to track down Mariella at last, but both of them find a strange comfort in the company as they bond over the loss of Elise. Gabriel joins the Black-card in the hope he can help solve everyone’s problems and continue to figure out what happened to Gareth, as a way of staying close to her without being physically close.

After Leon conducts a crazy scheme to kidnap all the Kings and force them to get along, plus to finally convince them that both Elise and him are okay with them becoming their own kind of pride. A reluctant truce seems to form with Gabriel’s off campus apartment as neutral ground, which gives Rider and Dante the chance to clear up some misconceptions that happened when their father’s died.

This all reaches a peak when Felix uses the Black Card’s powers to break into the place they all thought was safe and Rider must choose whether to help Dante or let his astral-adversary die and have Felix as his opposition in the gang war.

My review

A lot more happened in this book, there were some places in 2 and 3 where I felt we weren’t gaining much ground on what happened to Gareth or the various other plot points kicking around. This one had a much better pace, interspersed with some fun spicy scenes.

This series is a much better mix of serious to funny moments than Zodiac Academy is and I do think these authors write a good dramatic battle and cliff hanger ending! I went straight onto the final book, which is 22 hours long as an audio so it might be a minute before you get the review for the end of the series but I’m definitely invested in the ending now!

Read the Ruthless Boys of the Zodiac

The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited and Audible, use the affliate links below to find them on KU and Audible*

Dark Fae: Kindle link , Audible Link

Savage Fae: Kindle link, Audible Link

Vicious Fae: Kindle link, Audible Link

Broken Fae: Kindle link, Audible Link

Warrior Fae: Kindle link, Audible Link

*following these links won’t cost you any extra, it just might help me reach that dream of being paid to write this blog though!