More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
His grin is murder. “I wouldn’t dream of keeping something as sweet as you out too late.”
I scowl and shout, “What’s your problem?” Bradshaw snaps his attention back to me with the same coldness, but there’s a tinge of interest there now. “You’re here with us.”
So, I admire him in silence and let his movements take my thoughts away.
He’s a god in human skin.
“What God? Tonight, you only scream and cry for me. No God will bear witness to what I make of you.”
“What are you looking at?” I ask, annoyed. “At the woman who fears the ocean but not me,” he taunts.
“You’re the fucking bunny being assigned to our squad.” Oh. Fuck Me.
Malum: The Evil—the squad that goes where no one else can or is qualified to go, to snuff out the enemy quietly like ghosts in the darkness of night.
We stare at each other for a moment, the warm water soothing my entire body and making me want to melt in his arms. I shouldn’t want to be held by a murderous thing like him. But I do. I crave it like a shot of morphine. Jenkins’s eyes lower to my lips, lifting back to my eyes slowly before he leans in and kisses me. The world ceases to exist as the man I fear most adorns me with kisses and his dark dreams for us. I knew it then. Jenkins would ruin what good was left of me.
“Soldiers don’t cry.” Jenkins’s voice hums in my memory. His warm hands had spread over my shoulders. “If you give up, you die.”
tactical pants hang low on his hips and my eyes drift there momentarily. He is lethal and every instinct inside my body thrums on high alert. I think he really wants to kill me.
Devils do bleed.
A devil in human skin. Watching him move so fluidly gives me an itch I’ve been trying to ignore for weeks. Something inside of me yearns for him.
Be free.”
I’d do anything for this forever.
“Have I seen the darkest parts of you?” “Not even close.”
I’m going straight to hell when I die. For all the death on my hands. Further down, if there is something lower than hell, for what I’m about to do with the devil.
I could be in a room with a thousand screaming, dying men and I’d only see him.
Hatred and desire aren’t so different. Both are an obsessive, all-consuming emotion. It’s a thin line to walk on.
A god of a man. A devil of demons.
“I always wanted to be an astronomer. The universe is fascinating and holds many unknowns. I wanted to know all of the constellations and the galaxies beyond galaxies. I wanted the world.”
I like the way broken men grieve.
“I want to dominate you. I want to break you into a million pieces and make you answer only to me. I want to keep you as far away from my squad as possible before I ruin what’s left of
you. Because if you don’t leave, that’s what’s going to happen. I’ll break you, just like I break everything. Is that enough? Will you shut the fuck up now?”
Lovely little dreams. Things that aren’t meant for me.
“I’m curious to get to the bottom of you, though. I want to see the darkest things you’re hiding. I want to know why the monsters like you so much.”
“You make him trust you, make him need you, and then you take it all away.”
us. Together. I’ll always be by his side.
“We have snakes everywhere, Gallows. Trust no one.”
“No one?”
“No one but me, love.”
“You are a dangerous little thing. Beautiful, but dangerous.”
As long as I’m by his side, I will follow him to the grave.
I want to run my thumb over her bottom lip and tell her she makes my chest ache when she looks at me so tenderly. I want to tell her that the nights I laid beside her were the only ones I slept peacefully in fucking years. I want to tell her that I fucking missed her.
I just want her to hold me and continue to brush my hair back from my face. It brings back distant memories of when I was a child, when, for a brief moment under the sun, I was loved.
Right now, I’m not a dark forces war dog who cuts throats, and she’s not the heartless soldier who blows brains out without blinking. Instead we’re two wounded creatures, circling one another in our cage, curious about what will happen if we give in and collide.
comfort. It’s strange to me that I’m so drawn to wounded things—helpless creatures that I know can still turn and bite.
Rats never seem to remember that snakes are hiding in the bird’s nest too.
Sleep my bunny, your next breath is not promised.
like mechanisms of war, we move like death, thoughtless and only as weapons.
Would you watch the light leave my flesh? Would you send the devil back to hell?”
“We let them make monsters of us. Stolen vices.”
I want you to wear whatever the fuck you want and be a normal person. Not out here, with bullets flying between us. I want us to be out there in the real world.”
“Together, our broken pieces can do anything.”
“All I want is to be by your side. In training, in war, in death. I can’t picture myself anymore without you being there, Bun. You linger in my thoughts, in my fears. But mostly, you’re the cause
of all the emotions I feel again. I was dead until you tripped on my foot on the plane.”
“You are where my sanity starts,”
“You are where mine ends,”
“There is no life without you. There wasn’t one before, there sure as fuck won’t be one after,” he whispers. His eyes narrow with misery. “I love you, Bunny.”
In the madness and laughter, Bradshaw whispers against my ear, “Promise me forever, Bun. You’re where my sanity starts.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “You are where mine ends.”
