Glow (The Plated Prisoner, #4)

by Raven Kennedy

I won’t allow another storm to touch Auren. She has been flooded and wrung out, left to take the barrage without shelter. But so long as I’m here, I will be her shelter.

“We’ve all got a little rotten in us, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. It’s how we’ve survived.”

“You don’t have to be cruel to be strong. You don’t have to be mean to seem brave. You don’t have to look down on others in order to stand tall. Having emotions does not mean you’re weak. It means you’re smart enough to let yourself feel.”

I hate that I’m standing here, putting distance between us. But distance is the footpath of avoidance, and it’s the track I have to cling to for my own sanity.

I’ve always been treated like treasure, but with Slade, I’m simply treasured.

That’s the thing with trauma to the body—it shows up instantly. In breaks and bruises, in burns and in blood. But the trauma on the inside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.

Eruptive emotion pushes out of me, so loud I feel it must burst from the house and echo through the cave. As if it cries with me. And everything, everything, comes spilling out. Like a broken bottle, its contents leaked past the cracks. Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel full again. I sob and I grieve, and it’s not subtle or quiet, but a violent wracking of mourning that digs itself out of me and lands in a messy, hurtful heap. But all the while, Slade squeezes my hand and Digby stands watch. I may be empty, but I am not alone. And that, at least, is something.

When you hit rock bottom, you feel it. You break down, walls crumbling until you’re free-falling. The feelings that you tried to run from suddenly rush up around you in an unstoppable force, the gravity of your thoughts now nothing but a punishing plunge. When you slam into the bottom, that landing jolts you all the way to your very soul. You hit hard, and it cracks the very foundation of the world. The ground fragments beneath you, lines stretching far and wide. And then you’re left, a pile of rubble. But I realize something as I lie here, surrounded by the destruction of my plummet. These cracks that have spread out from my caustic landing, they’re not evidence of my ruination. They’re paths. Each jagged line leads from me and then diverts away, showing me all the different ways I could go from here.

The kind of tears your expression lets fall without fanfare. There is no choked breathing or scrunched up nose. No pulled lips or furrowed brow. This is the suffering of the silent. A hurt so deep it doesn’t show itself on a face.

Maybe none of us truly know our own strength. Not until the world has hacked away at us. But the point is, we aren’t strong because of our trauma. We were always strong to begin with. We just needed to figure it out for ourselves.

He’s infuriating, and coarse, and I shouldn’t think of him at all. Yet, I do. That first night, he said a little loathing makes it better, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since.

They caught me. Defended me. They were my instincts. My unconscious impulse and sentiment. They made me more. And without them. I’m less. Less steady, less sure, less free. You never notice what’s keeping you balanced until you realize you’re not standing straight anymore.

“Even the most powerful people can be made to feel powerless. Finding your strength even when you believe you have none is what makes you a true force. Nobody made you into what you are, my lady. You were always strong. You just had to prove it to yourself.”

With the right person, there is power when you kneel. There is adoration with submission. There is balance with control.

“One person’s pain doesn’t negate another’s. Our heartaches are not competition, but the bridge to empathy. So that we can look at one another and know that on some level, we understand. That’s one beautiful thing about grief, I think. That sometimes, we can find someone in the world to look at from the other side of the bridge of our torments and know that we are not alone.”

But my song of home doesn’t come from the sun. Mine comes from her.

as if the dark is the safe keeper of all things lustful and wicked.

I’ll be the villain for you. He is the epitome of death and revenge. The personification of rage. He destroys everything and everyone in his vicinity without glance or thought, and through the chaos, through the massacre, I revel in it. Maybe it’s the rot inside me. Maybe it’s being fae. But maybe, it’s simply the fact that the person I love is willing to destroy the world to protect me. And that is its own kind of power that not even this enclosure can drain away. So long as we’re together, everything is okay. Because I will fight for him, and he will kill for me, and if we need to be the villains, then so be it.