The Sinner (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #18)

by J.R. Ward

“You assume destiny requires your permission to exist.”

“You have me, forever. And if you require it, you can take my faith in you, for as long as you need it.”

Maybe the intellectual construct of fate, of destiny, was just a way to frame all the shitty fucking things that happened to people. 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.

Proof positive that whatever you were used to was normal no matter how weird it might have been without the habit part.

They were a hell of a pair. Like a sawed-off shotgun and a homemade quilt.

“We are all sinners—and yet our creator still loves us. And if the prerequisite for true romantic love was an unassailable history and character? The shit wouldn’t happen for anybody. You’re worthy of love. You deserve to be respected and cherished, and to get that, you don’t need to be anything different than you are. You have been created for a reason. You’re here for a reason. You have a purpose, and you have to believe that you’ll find someone who will help you in that purpose. And until that happens? All you really need to know is that you don’t have to be validated by anybody but yourself. You are enough.”

“Just believe in yourself,” he told her. “And you can do anything and be anything you want.”