Some love stories whisper. This one bickers, bleeds, and then, right when your guard is down, breaks your heart in a cold field under a white moon. The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley is the second half of the Dearly Beloathed duology, and it walks in with a promise baked straight into its title. Torment. Exquisite. Loving your enemy. Knightley is not being coy about what she plans to do to you.
For anyone new to this corner of the shelf, the series runs across two volumes:
The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, the instant bestseller that introduced an assassin, a healer, and the very bad idea of putting the two of them in the same room.
The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy, the follow-up that finishes what the first book started and refuses to let anyone off easy.
This is a closing act, not a fresh doorway in. Begin with book one, or you will feel like you wandered into a duel halfway through the third exchange of blades.
The Setup, Kept Spoiler-Free
Osric Mordaunt kills people for money and looks fabulous doing it. Aurienne Fairhrim heals people for a living and keeps an oath that begins and ends with harm to none. He is a Fyren. She is a Haelan. Their Orders sit at opposite ends of every moral line anyone ever bothered to draw: good and bad, light and dark, the healer and the blade.
Then he bribes her to cure the rot eating away at his powers, and the pair start meeting at the full moon to follow a healing protocol pulled from old fairy lore. Each session is meant to be clinical. Each session, instead, wears down the wall between them. That is the engine of the whole book: two people with every reason to loathe each other, quietly running out of reasons.
Circling all of it is a plague. A childhood pox has come roaring back through the ten petty kingdoms of the Tīendoms, and the further Osric and Aurienne dig, the clearer it becomes that someone set it loose on purpose. I will leave the rest sealed. Half the fun is watching the mystery pull its own noose tight.
Why the Romance Lands
Knightley writes yearning like she holds a personal grudge against your composure. The slow burn from book one turns molten here, and the heat never once arrives cheaply. It is earned across a run of moonlit sessions, grudging truces, and one library scene where nobody says a single thing they actually mean.
The Things She Gets Exactly Right
A few standouts:
The banter has teeth. Osric’s cricket familiar, a creature with the soul of a bitter theatre critic, may be the funniest supporting character in recent fantasy romance. Aurienne’s genet is no gentler.
Osric is vain in a way that reads as human rather than tiresome. He agonises over whether his hood looks better up or down. He introduces himself to a rival as “Mr. Hungwell.” He is absurd, and the book is in on the joke.
Aurienne gets to be the cleverest person in every room without being punished for it. Her science brain is her love language, and the story treats that as attractive instead of cold.
Beneath the jokes runs a real ache. When these two finally stop pretending, the writing drops to a hush, all fog and moonlight and a plum blossom tucked behind an ear. Knightley can swing from a filthy quip to a gut-punch inside the space of one page, and that whiplash is exactly why the payoff of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley hits the way it does.
The Craft: Old Words, Sharp Sentences
The World
The worldbuilding earns its own breath. Knightley grows her magic, the seith, out of Old English and Old Norse roots, then has Aurienne argue that any magic studied hard enough is simply science nobody has cracked yet. Waystones stand outside pubs. Familiars appear in childhood and grow up mouthy. The chapter titles alone are a small feast, running from I Can Fix Him and Other Lies She Told Herself to Hel Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here.
The Voice
Her prose pulls double duty and does both jobs well:
In comic mode, it is dry, arch, and thoroughly British, thick with sly asides that feel like the narrator leaning over to gossip with you.
In romantic mode, it goes lush and quiet, reaching for lyric imagery without tipping over into purple.
That range is the quiet triumph of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley. It is also worth knowing that Knightley made her name in online fan communities before this duology became her publishing debut, which explains the confidence of the voice. She writes like someone who already spent years learning what makes a reader laugh, ache, and refuse to sleep.
Where It Wobbles
No book wins everyone, and this one has honest soft spots worth naming plainly.
The middle sags a touch. The full-moon structure gives the plot a heartbeat, but it also turns a couple of sessions into something close to a checklist, and you may catch yourself waiting for the next reveal.
The plague plot and the romance compete for air. When Knightley leans into the conspiracy, the pace sharpens. When she lingers on the courtship, the danger drifts to the horizon. The two halves do not always carry the weight evenly.
Newcomers will flounder. The glossary and the recap up front are kind, but this sequel assumes you did your homework. The dense invented vocabulary rewards patience and gently punishes the casual dabbler.
A late swerve or two asks for a lot of goodwill. The internal logic mostly holds, though a handful of turns lean harder on feeling than on groundwork.
None of this sinks the ship. It does explain why a reader might close The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley feeling deeply satisfied rather than flattened with awe. It is very good. It stops a single step short of perfect.
Who Should Read It
This one is built for a particular reader. You will likely fall hard for it if you want:
Enemies-to-lovers with genuine venom before the tenderness arrives.
A slow burn that finally, mercifully, catches fire.
Humour drier than a good martini.
A magic system with footnotes and a pulse.
You may bounce off it if you prefer lean prose, dislike invented terminology, or need a plug-and-play standalone.
If You Loved This, Read These Next
For anyone hunting something to fill the hole this duology leaves behind:
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna: cosy magic and warm wit.
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross: rival hearts and aching letters.
The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake: clever, morally slippery, dark-academia tension.
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett: a scholar heroine and fairy lore with bite.
A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske: Edwardian magic, banter, and a proper slow-burn romance.
Final Verdict
Brigitte Knightley set herself a trap with that title, then strolled into it on purpose. The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley delivers the torment, the exquisiteness, and the loving, roughly in that order, and closes the Dearly Beloathed duology with a contented sigh rather than a scream of frustration. Read The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy first, then come here for the reckoning. Just clear your evening before you start. You will not be putting it down until the moon does.