Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)

by Rebecca Ross

He didn’t answer, but his gaze held hers, and she thought she saw something flicker through him, like a star falling from the cosmos, or a coin underwater, reflecting the sun. Something fierce and vulnerable and very unexpected.

There was excitement and passion and that breathless feeling of creation, and Iris felt it catch in her lungs, as if she were falling ill to whatever fever was fueling these people.

Time suddenly feels sharper than a knife grazing your skin, capable of cutting you at any moment.

Let us make our names exactly what we want them to be.

was that ache again. The one that tasted like salt and smoke. A longing he feared would only grow stronger with each passing year. A regret in the making.

“Yes,” she said, in almost a whisper. But the truth was … she felt in over her head. As if a rock were tied to her ankles and she had just been dropped into the ocean.

I grew something living in a season of death.

How one could wake to a sunrise and die by sunset. She had run through the smoke and the fire and the agony with Roman, his hand in hers. They had both tasted Death, brushed shoulders with it. They had scars on their skin and on their souls from that fractured moment, and now Iris saw more than she had before. She saw the light, but she also saw the shadows.

Even when the world seems to stop, threatening to crumble, and the hour feels dark as the siren rings … it isn’t a crime to feel joy.

The town no longer felt like a haven but like a snare, as if they were waiting to catch a monster.

“I pray that my days will be long at your side. Let me fill and satisfy every longing in your soul. May your hand be in mine, by sun and by night. Let our breaths twine and our blood become one, until our bones return to dust. Even then, may I find your soul still sworn to mine.”