Cold Hearted by Julie Hall & Leia Stone

 Cold Hearted by Julie Hall

and Leia Stone

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶

Blurb:

To save my kingdom, someone must die. Every hundred years, a curse descends on Faerie, ravaging its lands and killing its people. For the last two millennia, the Summer Court princess has always been the one to stop it. Now it’s my turn. I’ve been preparing to become one thing my entire the perfect assassin. My mission is simple. Travel to the mirror realm, find an Ethereum Lord, return to Faerie with his magical heart. But when I step through the portal, something goes horribly wrong, and I find myself at the mercy of Zander, a handsome royal guard who has taken me captive. Zander is arrogant, stubborn, and infuriatingly gorgeous, but I’m forced to play by his rules so that he will present me before his leader, the Ethereum Northern lord. Then my mission will resume. Cut out his heart and get back to Faerie. The only problem is, Zander has secrets, and when I find out what they are, they change everything, making me question if what I was taught my entire life was a lie. Now I’m left with an impossible choice. Fail my task, and everyone and everything I’ve ever known and loved perishes. Or complete my mission and destroy the one thing I never knew I needed to love. Cold Hearted is a full-length fantasy romance stand-alone with an HEA! This book is perfect for fans of enemies-to-lovers, fated mates, and forced proximity.

My Review:

Cold Hearted ended up being such a cute and surprisingly fun adventure read. From the start, the premise hooks you in right away: our FMC has one mission, kill the guy with royal blood in order to save her realm. Simple enough in theory… right? Except nothing about this journey turns out to be simple, and watching everything unfold is half the fun.

What really stood out to me was the FMC herself. On paper, she’s trained to be an assassin, skilled, prepared, and raised for a deadly purpose. But in reality? She’s so much softer and more endearing than you’d expect. She gives total “girl next door who accidentally got assigned a life-or-death mission” energy. She’s a dreamer at heart, constantly letting her thoughts drift and overanalyze and spiral in the most relatable way. That contrast between her deadly training and her gentle personality makes her incredibly likable and easy to root for.

And then there’s the humor, honestly, it was such a nice surprise. The book doesn’t take itself too seriously, and those lighter moments really balance out the tension of the mission. I found myself smiling more than I expected, especially during the interactions between the characters.

The forced proximity trope also works really well here. Being stuck together while technically being enemies on opposite sides of a deadly goal creates this constant push and pull that keeps the story engaging. And of course, the chemistry builds in a way that feels natural and fun to watch unfold. You can really see how they start to fit together, even when everything about their situation says they shouldn’t.

Overall, if you’re in the mood for an adventurous fantasy read with action, banter, forced proximity, and a slow-burn connection between two very well-matched characters, Cold Hearted is definitely worth picking up. It’s fun, it’s easy to get lost in, and it delivers that satisfying “watching them fall in love while everything is chaotic” experience that just works.