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’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.

Perhaps things are born from trauma. An anger. A clarity. A beast.

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.

You never notice what’s keeping you balanced until you realize you’re not standing straight anymore.

“Oh, Goldfinch, I’d follow you to the end of the world and tip right off the edge, all because of a crook of your finger.”

“You’re right,” he says, and despite the heat of the room, a chill lopes down my back. “But I will tell you this now, Goldfinch, and you will hear it. When it comes to your life, when it comes to the option between you living and dying, I will always step in. I will always choose to do whatever needs to be done to ensure that you fucking live.”

“I’m good to you. But I am every bit the villain that I warned you I was.”

I’ll be the villain for you. Not to you.

“If you’re a villain...then I’ll be a villain with you.”

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.”

“You’re mine to protect. To adore. To hear. To see. To experience. To love.”

“You’re mine, Auren. As wholly as I am yours. If there’s something you crave, if there’s some freedom you want to try the taste of, then you will do it, and I will be right there with you. Watching you devour your wants. And then I will devour you.”