Chokehold

**Author:** Leigh Rivers

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The violent collision of hatred and desire between two stepbrothers who have spent years building walls against each other, only to discover that the person they most want to destroy is the only one who truly sees them.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want a dark, intense romance that does not flinch from the ugliest parts of obsession, trauma, and the long road toward honesty. This is a story about masks, both literal and emotional, and what happens when two damaged people finally stop hiding.

Cole Carter has spent most of his life learning that love is a weapon. His biological father, Malcolm, taught him that lesson with fists and a police badge, leaving scars that Cole hides under tattoos and a carefully constructed shell of indifference. When his mother remarried, Cole gained a stepbrother named Blaise, and the two of them immediately understood each other in the worst possible way. They became mirrors, each reflecting back the parts of themselves they could not stand. For years, Cole and Blaise have existed in a state of open warfare. They trade insults at family dinners, throw punches in hallways, and maintain a mutual hatred so convincing that even they believe it. But hatred and obsession share a border, and the line between them is thinner than either of them wants to admit. The story begins at a party in the woods, where a masked chase game becomes the catalyst for everything that follows. What happens between Cole and Blaise in the dark is brutal, anonymous, and impossible to undo. It sets off a chain of events that will strip away every pretense they have built, exposing the raw need underneath. Leigh Rivers writes with a deliberate intensity that matches her subject matter. The prose is unflinching, the emotions are heightened, and the characters are allowed to be genuinely difficult, sometimes unlikable, and always human. This is not a gentle romance. It is a story about two young men who have been damaged by the people who were supposed to protect them, and who find in each other both the source of their deepest pain and their only possibility of healing. The tone is dark, atmospheric, and charged with tension. Rivers creates a world where violence and tenderness are constantly intertwined, where a hockey stick can be both a weapon and an instrument of intimacy, where a mask can hide identity and reveal truth. The reader should expect to be uncomfortable, to be challenged, and ultimately to be moved by the strange, ferocious love that develops between these two characters. The central question of the novel is simple…