The Sinner (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #18)

by J.R. Ward

Predators required prey. So sometimes, you needed to eat even when your stomach was full.

Maybe all the proverbial bad luck that rained down on the heads of essentially good folks, all that Murphy’s Law, was actually not luck at all, just the impersonal nature of chaos at work. Maybe all the disappointment and injury, the loss and alienation, the chips off the soul and the heart that were inevitable during any mortal’s tenure upon the ashes and the dust to which they were doomed to return, were not preordained or personal in the slightest. Maybe there was no meaning to the universe, and nothing after death, and no one driving the metaphorical bus from up above.

After all, mortals weren’t the only things that had a shelf life. History likewise decayed and was lost, over time. Lessons forgotten… rules mislaid… heroes dead and gone…

Sometimes, between married people who had remained connected after the nuclear bright glow of sexual attraction dimmed, there were no words needed. No words that could be enough. The emotions went too deep.

As with so much in life, what folks thought they saw depended more on who they were than what may or may not have been before them.