Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)

by Rebecca Yarros

A dragon without its rider is a tragedy. A rider without their dragon is dead.

Don’t become another name on the death roll.”

His eyes are the shade of gold-flecked onyx.

“And I’m not going to tell you again. She’s mine to handle. Anyone feel like arguing?”

You look all frail and breakable, but you’re really a violent little thing, aren’t you?”

“No one asked you to think, squad leader,”

You are not attracted to toxic men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, getting all attracted.

Ahh, there she is, the little voice that’s been riding my shoulder lately, daring to give me hope that I might actually survive Presentation.

First Squad, Claw Section, Fourth Wing.

Even temples can be rebuilt, but books cannot be rewritten.

“I am annoyingly aware of everything you do.”

“Because I can’t seem to stay away.”

There’s nowhere in existence you could go that I wouldn’t find you, Violence.”

“You make it hard to look away.”

“It’s getting kind of incestuous around here.”

“Yeah, well, I’m his…” I open my mouth and shut it a few times because…fuck if I know what I am to him. But the longing that holds my heart hostage, this driving need to be at his side because I know he’s suffering, no matter if it means throwing myself headfirst into uncertainty…I can’t deny what he is to me. I kick off the leather slippers of my dress uniform—they’re more of a hazard than anything, and in this wind? Well, we’ll see how it goes. “I’m just…his.”

“There’s only you, Violence. Is that what you needed to hear?”

“You have everything I have to give.”

“Worrying about you is ninety-nine percent of what I do.”

She can’t die, and not just because there’s a chance I won’t survive. She can’t die because I know I can’t live without her even if I do. Somewhere between the shock of our attraction at the top of that turret to realizing she risked her own life by giving up a boot for someone else on the parapet that first day to her throwing those daggers at my head under the oak tree, I wavered. I should have realized the danger of getting too close the first time I put her on her back and showed her how easily she could kill me on the mat—a vulnerability I’ve allowed no one else—but I brushed it off as an undeniable attraction to a uniquely beautiful woman. When I watched her conquer the Gauntlet, then defend Andarna at Threshing, I stumbled, stunned by both her cunning and her sense of honor. When I burst into her room and found Oren’s treacherous hand at her throat, the rage that made it so easy to kill all six of them without batting an eye should have told me I was headed for a cliff. And when she smiled at me after mastering her shield in mere minutes, her face lighting up as the snow fell around us, I fucking fell. We hadn’t even kissed, and I fell.