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Warner shrugs. “Haider is less competent. He’s self-righteous. Spoiled. Arrogant.” “Wait—are we describing you or Haider?”
KENJI ✋🏼😭
Kenji’s head pops up. “Obsessed with his physique, huh? You sure you two aren’t related?”
this kid ✋🏼😭
“I detest you.” “I love that we feel the same way about each other.”
“You know what I think,” she says, still smiling, “about someone telling me what’s legal and illegal about the way I dress?” She holds up two middle fingers.
ooooh i like her!
She’s tugging at her sleeves as though she might tear them off. It’s so adorable I almost kiss her right then.
It made me wish I’d had a sister. Or a mother. Someone to learn from and lean on. A woman to teach me how to be brave in this body, among these men.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” and Kenji grabs my arm, goes weak in the knees, and says, “Oh my God, J, I think I’m in love.” I ignore him.
KENJI 😭😭😭
Because I’ve never been in love before, so I don’t know if this is love or if I just have, like, food poisoning?”
“Wait, what’s that?” He cups his hand over his ear. “You’re worried I’m going to leave you for another woman?” “Shut up, Kenji. I’m not jealous.” “Aw, J.”
She’s never lived anywhere but in books and memories.
“Touch him one more time,” Juliette says quietly, “and I will rip your heart out of your body.”
Haider’s eyebrows fly up his forehead. He blinks. Hesitates. And then: “I didn’t realize that was something you could do.” “For you,” she says, “I’d do it with pleasure.”
I love that the girl who blushes so easily in my arms is the same one who would kill a man for hurting me.
I wonder if she knows that I would do anything for her.
awwwww, Aaron Warner you are the sweetest 🥹
“Yeah, I’m flattered, J, but I don’t like you like that.” My mouth drops open. “How many times do I have to ask you to stop falling in love with me?”
But I’d never seen him just sit and listen to music.
I feel certain that my imagination is much more dangerous than any of his truths.
Politics, it turns out, is a science I don’t yet understand. Killing things, breaking things—destroying things? That, I understand. Getting angry and going to war, I understand. But patiently playing a confusing game of chess with a bunch of strangers from around the world? God, I’d so much rather shoot someone.
I think here it is, death again,
trying not to drown in the darkness of my own thoughts.
“Our nation needed change. It needed a leader with heart and passion and I am not that person. Juliette cares about these people. She cares about their hopes, their fears—and she will fight for them in a way I never would.”
i absolutely love that Aaron is hyping up Juliette 🫶🏼
Castle shakes his head. “Her parents are coming for her,” he says. “And when they do you’ll know for certain that I’ve not led you astray. But by then,” he says, “it’ll be too late.”
“They were offered willingly.”
in the first book in the series, Shatter Me, Juliette mentions that her parents gave her up willingly, so it's like a little fact that Aaron is learning. i thought that was neat
Your silence on the subject will end only in devastation.”
I feel empty, like there is nothing inside of me but this broken heart, the only organ left in this shell.
I have a heart, says science, but I am a monster, says society.
My mind is still dense and foggy, swimming in confusion.
Flesh and bone breaking in the night, hushed, muffled voices—suppressed shouts—cellmates I’d never see—
The words are warped like I’m hearing them underwater and I swim toward them,
I’m so warm now, warm and tired and drowning again in strange dreams and distorted memories. I feel like I’m swimming in quicksand and the harder I pull away, the more quickly I am devoured
the life I choose to forget has not will never ever forget me
It was The Reestablishment—my own father—who put Juliette back in isolation. For more tests. More surveillance. And this was when our worlds collided.
She was, and will forever be nothing more than a toy to them—a science experiment to watch carefully, to make certain the concoction doesn’t boil over too soon.
Instead, Juliette Ferrars has become an incurable cancer we must cut out of our lives for good.
Juliette has no idea she ever had a real family—a horrible, insane family—but a family nonetheless.
That I am the true monster, completely and utterly unworthy of her love.
I don’t know how to extricate myself from the mess made by my own father. A mess in which I was unintentionally complicit. A mess that, upon its unveiling, will destroy the little bit of happiness I’ve managed to piece together in my life.
I will lose her. And it will kill me.
I wonder what it would be like to have a friend.
The look on his face is enough to break my heart.
“Oh. Do you want to talk about it?” James is still blathering. I don’t understand why Kent won’t make him stop. I shake my head. But this only seems to encourage him. He sits down beside me. “Why not? I think you should talk about it,” he says.
awwww, James is so sweet 🥹
“You look like you could use a hug,” he says. “Do you want a hug? Hugs always make me feel better when I’m sad.”
awww James you're making me cry
I feel the smile break off my face. This little boy. He’s also mine, my brother, and he may never know it.
oh my gosh, i'm tearing up 🥲
like I’ve been flung from the earth and I’m headed directly for the sun, like I’m being burned alive and somehow, I can still hear him, even as my skin melts inward, as my mind turns inside-out and everything I’ve ever known, everything I ever thought to be true about who I am and where I come from v a n i s h e s
I educated myself in cognitive behavioral therapies;
YESSSSS!!! i love when authors incorporate actual techniques for anxiety! this makes me so happy!
“Birthday gifts from your dad?” Kenji blinks, fast. Looks around, speaks to the air. “What the hell kind of soap opera did I just walk into here?”
KENJI ✋🏼😭
“Oh good, I can practically hear the tiny gears in your tiny brain turning.”
Aaron picking on Kenji is hilarious 😭😭😭
“All right, all right, drama queen, calm down. And tell me about this classified business.”
KENJI ✋🏼😭
My entire life has been an experiment.
I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my life, but I never thought I’d have the pleasure of seeing Kishimoto shut his mouth for longer than five minutes.
