More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
never dreamed it would end like this, my lord: your blood splashing hot flecks onto my nightgown and pouring in rivulets onto our bedchamber floor. But creatures like us live a long time. There is no horror left in this world that can surprise me. Eventually, even your death becomes its own sort of inevitability.
War is never valiant, only crude and hideous. Any left alive after the rest have been cut down do not last long exposed to the elements.
But the girl I had been disappeared the instant you pronounced me yours.
War is the whetstone that grinds down all sense, all humanity.
You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.
I drank from you drop by agonizing drop as you slid all the way inside me, obliterating any memory of a life before you.
You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need. I never knew the meaning of the word enthralled before you.
You were fucking her in our bed. No. Your bed. I was only ever a guest, every night contingent on my good behavior.
esire makes idiots of all of us. But you already knew that part, didn’t you?
Lying with her made me feel so vibrantly alive. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was already dead.
I tried to be generous with you, my love… but the seeds of doubt, once planted, put down deep and stubborn roots. Soon, the suspicion that you had not been entirely honest began to gnaw at me, despite the joy of a life shared with you and Magdalena. I was suspicious, and even more dangerously, I was curious.
I recoiled from the box as though I were Pandora herself, pouring woe out into the world.
Like Christ, I had become intimately acquainted with violence and the sins of the world, but I had not come away unblemished. Violence felt like holiness to me now. Perhaps I had given something away the night I had first tasted your blood, and now the place inside me where God used to dwell was empty. I hoped not, on that night of all nights. I needed divine strength in my veins. I needed some sense of worth beyond your hard-won approval of me.
“We cannot exist only for each other!” Alexi screamed, right in your face.
But now, all my carefully crafted excuses for you dissolved like sugar under absinthe, revealing a truth I had spent centuries avoiding.
But, like Eve, I had taken a bite of forbidden fruit and been rewarded with all the knowledge I had hitherto been denied. I knew just as much as you, and I knew you were just as mortal as any human man, under the right circumstances. You could kill us, yes. But that meant you could also be killed.
on’t ask me why I did it. I was tired of being your Mary Magdalene.
nd so, my love, we have come to the end of our lives together. Your bones are moldering in a charred grave somewhere in the French countryside and I am moving through the world, truly free for the first time in my long life. My nights are full of long walks and the scent of ocean breezes and the sound of people singing. Sometimes, I hear your voice in my dreams and I wake with a start, but I’m getting better at soothing myself back to sleep these days. Perhaps in time I will stop asking God for His forgiveness. Perhaps I will be able to uncurl the defenses around my heart and let someone see
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
