The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves, #1)

by Roshani Chokshi

There were so many wants inside him that he doubted there was room for blood in his body.

she asked him once, he told her it was because he wished the world were easier. Small enough and manageable enough to fit in the hollow of one’s palm.

As much as he could see the world, it would not see him.

He could still change the world … maybe not with something as dramatic or grand as Forging, but in more intimate ways. Writing. Speaking. Human connection.

Nothing was invincible but change.

He wished he didn’t know what he had lost. Maybe then every day wouldn’t feel like this. As if he had once known how to fly, but the skies had shaken him loose and left him with nothing but the memory of wings.

the ripping teeth of something cruel. Hope.

Lust was one thing, but what she’d felt that night was a pull … the kind that keeps stars from falling out of the night sky. It was vast. It was unlike what she’d imagined.

“Half of winning, my dear wallet, is simply looking victorious.”

Outside the windows lay true night. Not the hesitant midnight of Paris,

Séverin quickly shoved down the memory. It belonged to another life.

As solid as smoke and just as powerless.

fear grew in places unlit by knowledge.

Pain lanced through Séverin and he winced at the sharpness of it. Unripe, untested joy. The kind that doesn’t know any better than to explode furiously behind the ribs. He didn’t know what to do with it. He wanted to hold it at arm’s length before it could devour any more of him,

he felt that thread of hunger sewing them all together in the moment, so that when it came right down to it, perhaps their souls would have been indistinguishable.

Enrique thought he could feel everything … From the heat vibrating off Hypnos’s hand, which was just an inch too close, and the glow of Zofia’s candlelight hair as she bent her head to inspect her newest invention, to the sugar crystals from the cookie Laila had snuck him and the cold of Séverin’s fury as he stared at the clock. Enrique, who had always dreamed about what magic might feel like, thought he had found it then: myths and palimpsests, starlight sugaring the air, and the way hope feels painful when shared equally among friends.

the truth of the words brushed against his skin, raising the hairs along the back of his neck.