Wicked Beautiful (Wicked Games, #1)

by J.T. Geissinger

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell no fury as a woman scorned. – William Congreve, The Mourning Bride

But if there’s anything life has taught me, it’s that every worthy endeavor is challenging…and usually painful. Nothing truly valuable comes easy. A battle easily won is no battle at all.

I’ve sworn to bury him. I can’t expect not to get a little scratched and bruised while I’m digging the grave.

I’m not above getting my hands dirty if it means getting what I want. And what I want is her. No matter what it might cost me.

I don’t play with fire. I am the fire.”

“I want to know all the dark places in you,” he whispers vehemently, his arms like a vise. “I want to be the one who has the key that unlocks all your bolted doors and chases away all the monsters you keep hidden behind them. I want to be the light inside your darkness. I want to be your rock and your safety net, the soft place you can fall.”

All the air is sucked from the room. The clocks stop ticking. The earth stops spinning under my feet. I’m no longer ice, I’m granite.

“I’m telling you all this so that you feel safe with me knowing what I know about you. So that you know I’ll never tell anyone who you really are, because I trust you, and you trust me, and together our secrets are safe from the world.”

He is, and will always be, the center of my universe, the axis on which everything else turns.

Then, like a phoenix, I rose from her ashes and created something new, something better.

Hate will devour you. Anger, no matter how righteous it feels, is a straight, short path to hell. Only forgiveness will set you free. Only forgiveness can heal your scars. Forgiveness not only for those who’ve wronged you but also for yourself.

Life is hard enough without making lovers of our demons.

The past is fixed in stone. We can’t carve new endings to old stories, no matter how desperately we might want to.