He smiled at me still, broadly and without restraint or hesitation. Isaac had never smiled at me like that. Isaac had never made my breath catch, just a little bit. The.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d escaped shackles twice now – only to wind up back here. A temporary freedom. Borrowed time.
He took my hands. His callused fingers, strong and sturdy, were gentle as he lifted my bleeding hand to his mouth and kissed my palm. As if that were answer enough.
I will find you again,” he promised her. “In whatever life comes after this.
Chaol stepped up to the line. “Dance with me,” he said, and held out his hand to her.
To the huntress who remembered to reach back for those less fortunate.
A thread in a tapestry. That’s what it had felt like the night she’d left the gold for Yrene in Innish. Like pulling a thread in a tapestry, and seeing just how far and wide it went.
It’s so much harder,” she said, groaning as she chucked the rest of the blanket into my lap and rose to her feet. “When enemies turn into friends. And the opposite, I suppose. What didn’t I see? What did I overlook or dismiss? It always makes me reassess myself more than them.
And maybe that worked for who I was before. Maybe it doesn’t work for who – what I am now.
Because even though he’d pretended nothing had happened after the dance they’d shared last night, something had. And maybe it had taken her this long to realize it, but this man – she wanted that life with him.
She looked at the exquisite red carpet beneath her feet. Someone had done a splendid job of getting all the blood out. How much of the blood on the carpet had been hers – and how much of it had belonged to Sam Cortland, her rival and coconspirator in the destruction of Arobynn’s slave agreement? She still didn’t know what Arobynn had done to him that night.
He was allowed to break, so that this forging might begin.
Sartaq looked her over again. “You really should have been promoted.
I suppose some would call ten years as a trained assassin to be experience.
Aelin was insane, Dorian realized. Brilliant and wicked, but insane. And perhaps the greatest, most unremorseful liar he’d ever encountered.
Fate had kept me alive just to get to this point, just to see if I was listening.
If she picked Roland over you, that makes her the greatest fool who ever lived.
A deadly, vicious sort of calm filled Celaena’s veins. She’d snapped once at Lysandra – when they were thirteen and Lysandra had snatched a lovely lace fan right out of Celaena’s hands. The ensuing fight had sent them tumbling down a flight of stairs. Celaena had spent a night in the Keep’s dungeon for the welts she’d left on Lysandra’s face by beating her with the fan itself.
And she was. For the first time in years, she was truly happy. The feeling curled around every thought, a tendril of hope that grew with each breath. She was afraid to look at it for too long, as though acknowledging it would cause it to disappear. Perhaps the world would never be perfect, perhaps some things would never be right, but maybe she stood a chance of finding her own sort of peace and freedom.
She had been right. Why was she always right, in her own odd way?