The Man Who Gives the Orders Has Exactly One Weakness — Dashvagashi From the High Councilman's Chair

The Deal Series, Book 2 · by Desiree Sandz · Told through the hero's chapters · 18+

Power fantasies are easy. Power responsibility fantasies are hard. Dashvagashi is the second kind, and that's what makes it one of the strongest entries in The Deal series.

He is High Councilman. He sits at the top of a hierarchy that spans planets, colonies and battle stations. When intercepted slave ships turn up carrying humans nobody has files on, it's his call where they go. When two councilmen nearly kill each other over an assignment, he's the one who shuts it down calmly, over comms, in a voice more frightening than any shouting. He never raises it. He doesn't have to.

Command written properly

Sandz clearly enjoys writing this man, and it shows. His chapters are all quiet authority and dry internal commentary. He walks into a village, clocks a human boy in a crowd, and within four sentences has reorganized his entire day around it. He kneels down to a scared kid because he calculates that towering over a child gets him nothing. Every move is deliberate.

For space opera romance readers who want the politics to actually function councilmen, jurisdictions, relocations to Maldone, colonies like Blay59, the whole administrative skeleton of this universe Dashvagashi's POV is where the machine gets explained. And it never reads like a lecture, because he's always explaining it while trying not to look at one specific woman.

And then there's the problem

The problem is that he found her. Years ago. In a crate. And every instinct he has says protector, and every other instinct he has says something completely different, and a man in his position does not get to be confused in public.

He can relocate a population with a sentence. He cannot make himself stop noticing when she laughs.

What's excellent here is that he never once uses his rank to get what he wants. Not once. He is agonizingly aware of the imbalance, and the entire romance is built on him refusing to lean on it which means when things finally shift, it's because she moves first. That's a green flag the size of a battle station.

Why this book matters to the series

●        It's the load-bearing wall of the whole sixteen-book universe ranks, colonies, how humans ended up out here

●        Introduces threads that pay off books and books later

●        Mikel, Knoxy's found-brother, is here being an absolute menace and stealing scenes

●        Sets the tone for how Sandz writes powerful men: restrained, devoted, never coercive

Bottom line

If your ideal hero is the guy everyone else is scared of, who has never once been scared of anything, quietly losing a war against his own heart over a woman half his size — Dashvagashi is going to live rent free in your head. Book 2 is where The Deal stops being a good series and starts being a universe.

For readers coming from military and political sci-fi

Dashvagashi's chapters are the closest The Deal series gets to straight political science fiction. Jurisdiction disputes. Relocation policy. Which councilman answers to whom. What happens administratively when a ship full of stolen people gets intercepted and nobody has a legal framework for the species aboard.

If you've bounced off romance before because the world felt like wallpaper, this is the book that proves it isn't. There's a functioning government here with competing interests and genuine bureaucratic friction, and the romance happens inside it rather than instead of it.

Series placement

Book 2 of sixteen, and arguably the most structurally important entry in the run. Almost every later book references decisions made here. Blay59, Aquado, Maldone, the councilman hierarchy, and the humans-in-cargo throughline all get established or expanded in these pages. Read it second, and you'll spend the next fourteen books catching callbacks.

Meet the man who runs the galaxy and the girl who runs him. Available now at desireesandz.com.

Get the Book →

Tags: alien warrior romance · space opera romance · powerful hero romance · dual POV romance · sci-fi romance series · Desiree Sandz books · The Deal Book 2