Taken by Touch and Torment (Eternal Obsession, #2)

by Maggie Sunseri

I’d been absorbing every blow, transforming each crucifixion into sublimity.

“If you want to be someone who matters in this life, you have to lean into the hunger. You have to sit with it. You have to feel it so viscerally that you no longer feel it at all. It’s the fighting that makes it painful. The yearning, the wishing for something more than you currently have. Victory is for those who play the long game. For those who choose lasting fulfillment over fleeting pleasures. Victory is for us. Not them.”

“I will do what’s right for them both, because there is no world without Scarlett. And Scarlett is in love with the world. I would sooner die than let anything she loves go up in flames.”

They literally stuffed me inside a duffle bag. I was kept company by dildos, a flogger, lingerie, and a short blonde wig. Rosalind’s perfume nearly suffocated me in this enclosed space, which may have been the point, another way to cover up my scent.

Cackling

I understood now that self-love was the love that had always mattered most, from which all other love rippled.

Scarlett Hale, my soul has been in love with yours since we were nothing but flecks of stardust. I would sooner die than let you believe otherwise ever again.”

“Does it make you uncomfortable to see your God on his knees before you, Little Flame?”

“Feel what you feel. But feelings and thoughts are not always reality. Especially when they’ve been planted inside us by those who wish to make us small.”

I wished the wounds behind my eyes were so easy to erase.

I’m team Scarlett, not team broody, arrogant vampire.”

That’s a real friend

“I love every single part of you, from the wicked to the sublime. That powerful mind of yours, equally infuriating and captivating. The delicious chaos of your soul—the way it yearns for adventure and novelty, sex and power, comfort, love, and belonging. You became my entire world without even a drop of magick. We are inevitable. We always have been. And I will never stop showing you how hopelessly entangled my soul has become with yours. It is my deepest regret I ever showed you anything less.”

“As you’re allowed to be,” Rune said. “Just know that it was far from easy. It was all a bluff. I hadn’t ever truly let you go. I could never. Tell me to get on my knees again and grovel, to do anything at all to prove to you that I’m yours—and I’ll do it, Scarlett. Every day for the rest of our lives, if that’s what you desire.”

She hesitated. “Well, I suppose. But it’s pretty old, and I just—it’s not very consensual at times, and extremely dark. It’s more like she’s his… slave.” Snow’s features twisted with discomfort, watching my face closely. I blinked at her. “It’s fiction. I don’t mind.”

THIS

“You can rule this whole world, baby,” Rune said. “But don’t you ever fucking forget who rules you.”

“You will never receive closure from other people. Closure is something that you give yourself.”

“I love you, my soul,” he whispered against my lips. “I love you too, my darkness.”