The Assassin and the Desert (Throne of Glass, #0.3)

by Sarah J. Maas

Her taste for very expensive and very delicate underwear wouldn’t do much for her reputation.

“Tomorrow will be better. It might be only a foot more than today, but it will be a foot longer that you can run.”

And for that one heartbeat, when there was nothing more to it than that, she tasted bliss so complete that she tipped her head back to the sky and laughed.

“If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it—to love it. Some endure it through drowning it in sorrow, or by making themselves forget. Others turn it into anger. But Ansel let her pain become hate, and let it consume her until she became something else entirely—a person I don’t think she ever wished to be.”