The Killing Lessons (Valerie Hart, #1)

by Saul Black

But the world was full of women not noticing the men who were noticing them.

That's pretty scary stuff, as a man seeing an attractive woman and remembering her, but as a woman, continual avoidance of such men as creeps or potential threats. So sad.

The only thing that could possibly be enough was for none of it to have happened.

Exactly, as if you could go back into the past and start from that point onwards all over again.

The deep instinct was to preserve being alive and more or less unharmed and alone for as long as possible. The deep instinct was to wait and hope and pray and plead.

This is the viewpoint of a woman under duress, expecting to be raped, tortured and murdered, which I sympathize with as a man with my own history of trauma and the instinct just to survive instead of doing something about the situation.

Me. If you were lucky you had someone in your life for whom ‘me’ was always enough of an ID.

All fear was, in the end, fear of death. Once you knew you were dying, there was nothing left to fear.