The Chosen (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #15)

by J.R. Ward

Sometimes kindness and love could be just as difficult as violence to witness. Sometimes,

when you were on the outside looking in, watching two in-sync people was a scene from a horror film, the kind of thing that you wanted to look away from, forget about, banish the memory of—especially when you were about to go to bed for the day and facing hours upon hours of being alone in the dark.

“Don’t feel responsible for something over which you have no control. It’s a recipe for stress that will make you insanely miserable.

In large measure, his clientele were millennials, that generation born between 1980 and 2000. Defined by the Internet,

the iPhone, and a lack of economic opportunity, at least according to the human media, they were a demographic of lost moralists, committed to saving each other, preserving the rights of everyone, and championing a false utopia of mandated liberal thinking that made McCarthyism looked nuanced.

What if all the crap about a heavenly place where loved ones went and waited for you with patience was just a coping mechanism created by those left behind in the kind of agony he was in?

“I hated myself the whole time. But…I loved him. And I fear I always will.”

“We don’t get to pick who we fall for, and trying to talk yourself out of emotions is

a recipe for failure. You were not wrong in loving him, true? That part, no one can blame you for, ’cuz it is what it is—and you’ve suffered enough.

In fact, to him, proper Italians had become a subspecies apart from the other rats without tails on the planet.

“My heart is ever yours. Where’er I go, it is with you, through the darkness and into the light, from all my waking hours to those in which I sleep. Always…with you.”

Love was like life itself, she supposed. No matter how much of it you were blessed with, when the end came, it never felt like enough.

It was always better to follow a bumpy course of one’s own than a smooth but intractable trail set by another.

“I shall fight side by side with any of you until the night I die. But I will never force you to bow your heads before a leader. I respect you too much for the likes of that, and besides, I suspect that Wrath would know it. For all of his blindness…he sees things with a great clarity.”

When you were contemplating cheating on your mate, it was not easy on the conscience. And not something you wanted to do in the home you shared with her.

“Love is a matter between souls,” she said as she put her hand on the center of his chest. “Our love is between my soul and yours. Nothing is going to change that, not your past, our present…or

or whatever futures we may find apart. At least not on my side.”

“She told me I was rotten. That my face

was only what showed of the rot inside of me. That the real festering was within.” Layla shook her head. “She was talking about herself, then. She was revealing the truth of herself. To say those things to an innocent young?

To warp his mind and terrorize him like that? If there is...

of evil and rottenness, I don’t know...

“You are not in a position to give orders, female.” He laughed in a hard burst. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this is all over someone like him.

Who the hell is that piece of shit anyway—” “He’s your fucking brother,” she snapped. “That’s who he is.”

If I had fallen for another, I wouldn’t have been forced to be this strong—and there is nothing wrong in this world or the next in finding out your own power.”

She was fallible and could get confused and might well flounder from time to time. But she would survive. That was what the strong did.

If we can’t—if you can’t—forgive and love and move on, then you and I aren’t going to last, because I’m not going to sit by and pretend I’m okay with you resenting that poor daughter of yours just because she looks like her mahmen. Or waiting until I do something that you can’t get over. You challenged me to

forgive you for what you did—and I have. Now I’m expecting you to do the same for Layla.”

“Wherever I go, you shall ne’er be far from me. Wherever I sleep, you shall be beside me. What I eat, I shall share with you, and when I dream, we shall be together once again. My love, you are not gone from me ever, and I shall not take another. Till the very night I die.”

“That angel may be better suited for the job than he knows.”