You love him like a flower loves the sun.
You’re pretty much everything I’ve thought of for a while now.
It was a lonely, cold thing to live without expectations.
I wanted more time with the books. I wanted to spend the day in a quiet corner, sitting against a window, lost in words and worlds I had never been given access to.
I don’t dislike them, nor do I like them. I’ve never understood why one must love children simply because they are children. I don’t love people because they are people; in fact, I rarely like any people at all. If a child is somehow deserving of admiration, I certainly won’t deny it, but why hand it out like candy on Queen’s Day?
They had stripped us of everything we were taught made us women, and then told us we were mad.
He respected them, and he hated them, and he knew the world would be lesser for their deaths.
Religion was a means to an end. She had seen it wielded as a weapon. If she needed to use it, she would, but she would never allow herself to be used by it.
I wish many things, but I wish I had been able to tell you that I love you, in so many more ways than that word can convey in Alben.
I have met your sister, and I have met Mehmed. They love themselves and their ambition above all else. They love what feeds their ambition, and when it stops feeding that, the love will turn to hate with more passion than either could ever love with. You love with all your heart, Radu, and deserve someone who can answer that with all of theirs.
Those same fists had always defied everything expected of her.
The door opens with a rusted jingle, and an animatronic Santa insults my moral virtue three times. Ho, ho, ho.
Mehmed’s face and the feeling of his hands on her body still haunted her, though. She wished she could carve out his memory with a knife. Trace the lines of him that would not leave her, then cut them free. She would bleed, but she would not die. Still, he lingered in places no knife could ever reach.
I notice everything.
Perhaps, looking out over it, Mehmed saw what the beginning of his legacy would eventually lead to. Whatever Mehmed did, whatever he built, the greatest city in the world was irrefutable evidence that all things died.
Radu and Mehmed had both given her something she could not give herself, had seen her in a way no one else had and no one else ever would. They looked at her, ugly Lada, vicious Lada, and saw something precious. And she looked at them and saw Radu, her brother, her blood, her responsibility, and Mehmed, her equal, the only man great enough to be worthy of her love.
Oh, glorious, glorious caffeine and sugar. I can make it through anything as long as I have enough of those two.
He had imagined Constantinople, had wanted it for Mehmed. It had been simple and straightforward. But now he knew the true cost of things, the murky horrors of the distance between wanting something and getting it.
They are soldiers. They depend upon routine, and anything out of the ordinary will give them pause. And they are men. They hate to be insulted, but they love to hear others mocked. And they are fools, because they cannot imagine that a woman alone in the woods would be a threat.
I am yours,” she whispered. The words cut like knives, barely out of her mouth before he stole them, sealing them with his own lips.