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.

Perfect little hands and precious little feet, rounded, healthy bellies wrapped in a flannel sheet.

“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 wish I knew what would help you, my brother. I mean, if you need a reassuring hug…I can probably pay someone to give you one.”

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.

the good thing about being logical is that you can judge both history and the present with clarity—and

“With all of my black and withered heart, I love you, my female. I deserve not the earth beneath your feet, nor the scent of you in my nose, and never the gift of your blood, but I…I am e’er grateful for the change that you wrought upon me. You have saved me, and the only thing greater than my love for you is my gratitude.”

“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.

Big, Bad, and Really Fucking Bossy

Hell, even he didn’t want to be anywhere near this black mood he was sporting. But of course, everywhere you went, there you were, and all that bullshit.

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.

One good thing about smoking was that it gave you something to do with your hands. One bad thing about smoking was that when you decided to tap your ash as busywork, if you had a tremor going on, it showed.

She was a mahmen. She was a lover. She was a proud female, a strong female, a female who knew right from wrong, family from stranger, good from evil. She had lived through two birthings and stood up to a Brother just now, and she would take on the King if she had to. 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. Meeting her eyes in the mirror, she looked at her face for what felt like the first time. She had spent all those years waiting in the Sanctuary to be called into her role as ehros, her existence at once totally dictated and yet groundless, for there was no Primale to pleasure. And then she had bumped and bounced around on earth after she and her sisters had been freed, tiptoeing timidly in the unfamiliar ways of modern life. There had been the desperate needing with Qhuinn, and then the anxiety as the young had grown within her—during which her life had been split in half with Xcor. Following that? The birth that had nearly killed her and now the agony of the disintegration of her family unit…and the pending loss of Xcor. Yet she was still alive and she was here. Looking at herself in the mirror. 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.”