The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms, #3)

by Tasha Suri

Sometimes grief was pain, and sometimes it was simply absence—the wound in the shape of things that could not be felt or touched or comprehended.

I hoped. I had to know if hoping was stupid. And if you’re one of them, if you’re a yaksa that looks like Priya, then nowhere’s safe from you. And if you’re Priya, then nowhere’s safer than with you.

They were no different from each other really, underneath the thousands of ways that they were. They all feared something in the dark, something they could only keep at bay but never vanquish.

“You can love something knowing it can destroy you. Maybe you love it more for it.”

“There will always be men like you,” Rao agreed, pinning him harder. It was easy. “But they will not be you. That’s enough for me.”

The part of her that was ancient bared its teeth and wept—because it no longer remembered how to be only stars, and had lost too much.

—I think it is more powerful and strange than any crown. To live without masks. To swim through rage and grief and rise, alive, on the other side.