When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love, #2)

by Giana Darling

“I want to be the one to make you lose control. I want to watch you bend and break beneath my hands so I can glue you back together with pleasure.”

“You don’t understand this yet, but you do not need your armor all the time now. Not when you have me.” He lipped the edge of my jaw all the way up to my ear, where he spoke his next words on a purr. “I will be your sword.”

Put down your weapons, relax your shields. For once in your life, you do not have to fight all your own battles. I will fight for you. Here and now, I will be your champion. Do you trust me?”

Maybe every bad thing that had happened to us, maybe every single time we’d been made to feel like the villains of our own life story, we had been moving farther along the path to this. To us. Two broken and battered people made whole by love. Not sweet, sugary, happily-ever-after cazzato. No. This love was all teeth and claws, fight and passion. Light was easy to love. This love was dark. It was night as black as my eyes and as stormy as hers. It was seeing the shadows in each other’s souls and being drawn into their abyss. It was knowing we would never understand each other, not fully, and it was loving that challenge as much as the mystery. This was what happened when two villains fell in love.

He grabbed my hand and pressed it hard over his madly beating heart. “This beats for you. It bleeds for you. I am yours. Your sword, your champion, your lover, and your home.

How can you compare the beauty of a single bulb to the brilliance of light from the sun?”

Love makes animals of us all, all instinct and heart with no capacity for reason. I won’t judge you for loving her or the things you’ve done in service of that love, just as I wouldn’t judge a wolf for slaughtering sheep or a bear for protecting its cubs. It’s just in our nature.”