There Are No Saints (Sinners, #1)

by Sophie Lark

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer—both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams . . .”

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

I can smell Mara’s perfume on her sheets, stronger than when I followed her. I lay down in her bed, my head on her pillow. I turn my face so my nose is pressed against her crumpled sheets and I inhale.

I drop the panties back on the floor where I found them.

There’s no way to compare trauma, and I don’t want to try.

Other moments I’m filled with a deep, roiling rage. I want to find that motherfucker. I want to hunt him down. And I want to cut off little pieces of him until I start to feel better.

This isn’t the first time in my life someone hurt me.

Holding onto the anger, stewing in the rage, will only boil me alive from the inside. I learned that the hard way.

I know I’m being a spaz. I know I’m overreacting. But I can’t seem to stop.

I close my eyes, sinking into the music, finally finding peace.

I found the house directly behind Mara’s listed on Airbnb for eight hundred dollars a night. After messaging the owner, I convinced him to cancel his next three bookings so I could take the place for a month, starting immediately.

Strike that—it’s the view I care about.

Yet she rose again: stubborn, unbroken.

I feel a strange sense of satisfaction in her rejection of this buffoon. It would have lessened her in my eyes if she were besotted with someone so . . . pedestrian.

The verbage lol

I like her best in her private space. It’s a look inside her mind—her comforts and preferences.

Then she pulls her dress over her head and tosses it aside.

Id do the same

I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

She’s bronze as a statue in the purplish light. If I could sculpt her exactly like this, it would be my greatest work.

I’m so glad I have it all recorded. I can’t wait to watch it over again tonight.

Noooo wtf lol

Breathe. Take the feeling. Turn it into something.

gym <3

Maybe the common denominator is me.

“Great men don’t always make great fathers,” she says.

I don’t know what his intentions are, but experience has taught me that when a man takes a special interest in me, it’s never fucking good.

It really starts to fuck with your sense of reality. Every time someone tells you that you’re wrong, it didn’t happen like you said it happened, it couldn’t, you’re a liar, you’re a child, you don’t understand . . . Each hack of the hatchet takes a chunk out of your confidence, until you don’t even believe yourself anymore.

“In my experience, when men say ‘cooperative,’ they mean ‘obedient.’

I’ve been reading Dracula. It’s a cautionary tale. A warning to young women not to give in to the seduction of a man who wants to devour you.

While some little girls read the stories of a dark pathway into the woods . . . a twisted mansion with black windows and fog covering the grounds . . . That’s where we wanted to go. No matter what we might find inside . . .

“She’s a perversion of nature,” Cole says, in his calm, reasonable tone. “Mothers are supposed to be nurturing. They’re supposed to protect their children. Sacrifice for them. She isn’t a mother at all.”

“I really don’t,” she says. “I don’t have any faith. I learned early that some people have no kindness inside of them. No mercy. They’re broken and twisted and cruel, and they can’t feel anything but malice.

the white snake and the black. I thought the snakes were her and I, good and evil, locked in battle. Now I wonder if she meant them both to be me…

He really is a dark angel, biblical in power and in wrath.

“It’s up to you what’s good and what’s bad. There is no god outside you. You are god. This is your world, your life. YOU decide what to feel.”