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. I know that’s easier said than done, but try to keep it in mind?

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. But they were also, in the manner of youth, baselessly hopeful.

“At the risk of pissing you off, too, there is nothing you can say to me that will make this better or worse. That’s how you know you’re in Hell, by the way. No hope and pain is all you can see.”

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

“Funny how curses can come in all kinds of different flavors, true.

“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.”

Sacrifice was also in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, it was a personal, subjective assessment, a cost-benefit analysis that had no right answer, only a compass that spun around an individual’s variant of true north.

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. The former was harder, yet far more vital. The latter was like a living death…except you didn’t know you were dying because you were in a coma.

It was because you were a slut I couldn’t have and I took your promiscuity as my not being enough—and that made me want to prove myself to you over and over again. And I’m not doing that anymore.

So I’m, like, playing a hundred thousand different games all at once.” “Wowwww.” “I know, right? Thank God for ADHD!”

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

“Any male—any person—who doesn’t step up when someone needs help is doing something wrong.”

And you know, may I just say, I love a secure male who can let a female be his equal. It’s really sexy.”

“He’s your fucking brother,” she snapped. “That’s who he is.”

have been forced to be this strong—and there is nothing wrong in this world or the next in finding out your own power.”

And for the first time in her life, she respected what she saw. Bowing to her reflection, she said softly, “Pleased to meet you.”

“I don’t see your clothes, I never do, and a fancy dress wouldn’t change that. I don’t see wet hair, I feel the strands between my fingers. I don’t see pale cheeks, I am tasting your lips in my mind. You offer me all my senses at once, my female. You are so much more than any one thing about you.”

“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.”

To You: After all this time, you have been chosen. Welcome home.