Let's be honest, this is basically like trash tv. You know it's bad, terrible writing, no world-building like at all, filled with cliches and regurgitated scenes, but you still have a good time consuming it and enjoy the journey. That's exactly what this book was.
There were so many flaws and I saw all of them while I was listening to it. Almost every line from the big confessional and romantic scenes was cut together from many well used and cliche lines from other books. It was so bad that I was basically finishing the sentences before the audiobook was. That's just terrible writing. 
The world-building was nonexistent, worse than the first book honestly. They brought in the idea of other ordinary people that live in other cities where there were never elites but for some reason they don't have this probably made up disease that's going to weaken elites? Why not? And if the elites are so powerful, why haven't they tried to take over all of these other cities? I think human greed is pretty consistent in that they would have definitely tried to do that, so it should be at least mentioned why they didn't and chose to isolate themselves instead. And then they brought in the idea of like half elites which is also so confusing and not even hinted at until that moment, not to mention Kai's sister is the same thing. None of it made sense or even connected to the first book at all.
And that ending? Completely out of left field. I understand wanting a surprising twist to end the cliffhanger on, but you have to at least foreshadow it a little bit. The scenes with Kit were just atrocious honestly. They basically gave us nothing except that he was planning something and we could have guessed that much. Definitely should have been more foreshadowing in those scenes. He doesn't even mention Peyton in any of them. They felt completely unnecessary until I got to the end and realized what the author was trying to do with them but it just didn't work at all.
But despite all of this, I still enjoyed the book, once I stopped thinking of it as a romantasy at least. This book is a straight up romance book set in a fantastical world not our own. The elites were completely out of the picture for a majority of this book even, so you could probably think of it as being set in our world if you wanted to.
I do like the enemies to lovers troupe here and Kai and Paedyn's banter is really good so I enjoyed their chemistry and the push and pull of their relationship. This helped me enjoy the book overall despite its terrible writing. I do think you could almost read this one separately from the first one with only minimal confusion honestly because you can barely tell these two characters knew each other in a whole first book. You can tell they have a history, but you don't necessarily need to know their history to read this book. And I say that as someone who did read the first book but barely remembers any of it because I have such a terrible memory haha. 
Anyway, if you just want to have fun reading something and can ignore any questions about the world then book is set in, you might enjoy this series. If not, definitely stay away from it.