All This Twisted Glory (This Woven Kingdom, #3)

by Tahereh Mafi

This was worse, infinitely worse. Her ultimate show of compassion toward him had been his undoing,

He knew now that she was so far above him he wasn’t even worthy of standing in her shadow.

God, he’d wanted her. He’d wanted her with an all-consuming thirst, with the desperation of a man waiting to die.

It bothered him to think of it as anything but coincidence; he didn’t like to imagine he’d been born for this role, brought into the world only to endure this misery. Fate, he thought bitterly, was only romantic when one was destined to be the hero.

Alizeh was the fulfillment of his most desperate, undisclosed desire. The constant, gnawing ache inside him—this pitiful need that grew only more fraught in the wake of every darkness that devoured him— He longed for her warmth, for her radiance. She’d been, from the first moment she’d wandered into his dreams, an enduring flame in the endless night, his only haven in the madness that inhaled him. This was his real weakness, and the devil had marked him easily.

“Imagine me dead and gone, child. This debt is not yours to bear.” “How can you say that,” came Cyrus’s quiet reply, “when it was you who asked me to bear it?”

He’d been afraid to go near her; he hadn’t been ready to hear her voice, to look into her eyes. He was terrified she’d go and do something brutal, like smile at him.

She’d shown him more loyalty and tenderness in two days than he’d ever felt in his life, and he knew then, with a force that drove the air from his lungs, that he would never survive her.

“Cyrus?” He felt delirious. He was staring at her with the awe of an idiot perceiving the sun for the first time. He nearly drew his hand down her cheek. Nearly kissed the side of her neck. Nearly slumped against her and fell asleep. “Yes, angel?”

Without fanfare she’d fallen from the heavens into the still waters of his life, and he wondered, uneasily, whether he’d feel the reverberations of her impact forever.

She stroked his hair, her fingers soft and cool against his heated scalp. “Tell me what happened,” she said quietly. “Who did this to you?”

“You could probably kill me and I’d thank you for it.”

Always, in her presence, he felt himself coming apart with a need that felt a great deal like madness.

Alizeh felt liquefied. For all the frost in her veins, she’d never known this kind of fever, never felt such desperation. And he’d never even kissed her.

“Are we finally done? Or are there more debates to be had? Please let me know now, so I might schedule time to lose the rest of my mind.”

I’m going to find out the truth about you, and when I do, I promise you this: I’ll ruin him. I’ll make the devil regret the day he was born.”