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She held her tongue, resisting the urge to tell him the only penetration tonight would be a bullet in his body.
“You’re worse than these monsters. You dangle hope and take it away every single time.”
She had lain in countless beds and been used against her will, with nowhere to escape but in her mind.
“The world isn’t ready to see who I would become if this—” his thumb pressed on her pounding pulse “—ever stops.”
She felt nothing; she spoke nothing; she saw nothing. She just stared at the cracked ceiling, recognizing the cracks within herself, widening, sharpening, lengthening.
Purposeless. Endless. Lifeless.
She wasn’t leverage, just dead weight,
In another life. Maybe, if she had a next one, it would be kinder to her.
“You have many wishes left in you, flamma, and I will lay every single one of them at your feet. Just keep fucking breathing, got that?”
“Exactly. I’m always behind you, even when you cannot see.”
She wanted to belong.
“Give me your eyes, flamma. I want to see the fire in them. Show them to me.”
"How can you become new if you haven't first become ashes?"
- Friedrich Nietszche
finding dark places within her she’d never explored before, owning them, taking them, telling her it was okay for her to have them.
After a lifetime of looking at cracked ceilings and peeling paint while pieces of her were ripped from her, he had given her a ceiling of beautiful stars and slowly put the pieces back together again. He had touched her soul.
“What is love to you?”
After being taken and taken and taken from, she was being given.
“If you ever choose another, make sure you kill me first.
will annihilate the fucking world before I let you go.”
She loved that she meant enough to him.
Feeling claimed, feeling chosen,
“You’re the oxygen that feeds my flames—without you, my existence is questionable.”
"With you, I would,"
“What I had before wasn’t sex. It was cruelty and it was cold. Being used, being displayed, being touched, everything was humiliating. I didn’t know it could be different, that I could feel different, until you.
“You invited the devil to play, don’t beg for mercy when he shows up.”
There is no reality where you and I exist that we don’t end up exactly where we are now. None.”
They had deserved to burn in the hell they had created.
"Feel everything you're feeling. Don't shove it under a rug, don't push it aside. What do you feel?"
Cruelty always cut the hand striking the blade.
she fucking loved him for it. She loved him for giving her a home, giving her a place to belong, giving her space to just be.
"I feel pity for you," she told the bald man. "I feel pity that you never knew love. And I feel pity because you're going to die painfully all alone, knowing you were never loved."
He had given her his fire.
Lyla stood with her devil and watched one of her demons and one of her hells be destroyed.
For a man who said he didn't feel, he sure loved her a fucking lot.
a woman who had beaten odds, every single day, and come out rising on the other side, with so much life inside her
He wasn't a believer, but she was his miracle.
Love was light, love was beautiful, love was pure. What he felt was dark, obsessive, deviant, and utterly possessive. He would kill for her, as he always had, and he would die for her, if need be. He would slay her demons and give her the sword to slay them if she wanted. He would hold her close and protect her from anything wanting to tarnish her being. She completed parts of him that had been jagged and raw, fitting inside them with softness and fluidity,
