Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

You had been the subject of attempted murder more times than you had fingers and toes. You had sat through a long, agonising dinner culminating in two elderly Lyctors getting their tongues on God. Your mouth had been very nearly kissed. The calm that came over you as you went to murder Ortus the First was the weary calm of someone who had already been tried within an inch of her fucking life.

You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda.

THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILISATION CAN EVER LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.

You didn’t have your original thumb and I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.

“The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”