Reckless (The Powerless Trilogy, #2)

by Lauren Roberts

“You overestimate me.” “No. I just see you.”

“The truth, then?” “The truth, always,”

Because, despite it all, I’ve come to realize that there is little I wouldn’t sacrifice for him.

Seeing her enjoy life makes surviving mine suddenly worth it.

I bite my tongue at the sting that still shoots down my body, but the sound of her laugh is healing, capable of making a man forget his own name, let alone his pain.

There is such beauty in resilience, in the ability to laugh despite it all.

It’s hard to believe that something so beautiful would willingly stare at the likes of me.

“Are poets not just fools with fancy words?”

Her laugh alone could cure the most corrupted parts of me, and that is exactly what it’s done since the day I met her.

“I think I would fall on my sword if it meant you mourned me,”

Kai Azer the man that you are.

“Call us even. Call me crazy. I don’t care. Just…” His eyes are pleading, brimming with emotion. “Just call me yours.”

He is my anchor, and I am willing to sink, so long as it is with him.

“No, I’m sick of running. And I won’t spend the rest of my life doing it unless it’s you I’m running back to.”

“Then I’ll spend the rest of my life tracking you down,” he says quietly. “Glimpsing you in the shadows. Fighting you in the streets. Dancing with you in my dreams. Because living without you is only bearable when I know you are out there still living too.”

“You are my proof of a paradise,”

I could burn this palace to the ground like I did her house, just for a chance to confess my love before the flames consumed me.

This is not how I will remember us. Not as enemies or traitors or monsters, but as two people dancing in the dark, swaying beneath the stars. Her feet atop mine, her head on the heart that beats only for her. Just Pae and Kai.

I will smother every emotion but the one that belongs to her. I will love her until I am incapable of the feeling.

She was supposed to be my forever. Now I’ll watch her become someone else’s. Because the beast doesn’t get the beauty.