He stares at me so darkly, so hungily that I can only nod. Agree. Of course, I feel it. “I do”, I admit.
Didn’t she know yet? People you loved, the ones you cared about the most, they all died eventually. No one was spared. When you lost them, everything you had, all of your heart, was lost, too. It crippled you. Left you an empty shell, functioning on instinct alone. “You’re horrible,” she whispered, so softly that.
Some of us are killers. It’s in our blood... that ability. It doesn’t mean we walk around killing withour conscience, but we’re just... better equipped to do it. Some people don’t have it in them, but we do. You’ll feel a lot better once you accept that.
My imprint is there for the world to see. I don’t try to hide it with my hair or a high collar. When I got ready for school this morning, I kept thinking of Sean. How proud he appears. Unapologetic. And I want to be like that. I don’t want to look cowed or ashamed. I may not want to be this, but I don’t want to be that girl, either. I don’t want to be afraid.
I only know that I can’t live without flight. Without sky and moist, breathing earth.
We’re just doing our best to live in this world, Davy.” Sean’s voice stretches into the fading dark. “We’re not perfect, but we’re not monsters, either. We’re just human.
People wait their whole lives for this. Sometimes half their lives pass before they find it. Sometimes they never do. They settle for something else. Or nothing at all. But we found each other now, Georgia. Do you know how lucky that makes us?
No longer do I fear. No longer do I let others define me. I know what I am. What I’m capable of. That I’m a girl... a woman who will fight to survive.
My wings grow, slightly longer than the length of my back. The gossamer width of them pushes free. They unfurl with a soft whisper on the air – a sigh. As if they, too, seek relief. Freedom.
I felt her heart pounding against her ribs and directly into me. Or maybe it was my heart. Curled against each other like two locked pieces of a puzzle, I could not tell where I ended and she began. There was just this. Us. One shared heart.
Finally, the sun peeks over the mountains in a thin line of red-gold that edges the dark lake.
I relax my thoughts and absorb everything humming around me. The branches with their gray-green leaves. The birds stirring against the dawn.
My face tightens, cheeks sharpening, subtly shifting, stretching. My breath changes as my nose shifts, ridges pushing out from the bridge. My limbs loosen and lengthen.
In this remarkably fast-developing world of science and technology, never forget that we are more than genetic code. We can be more than the labels applied to us. We can be more than what others whisper behind our backs or shout in our faces. Free will exists. We need to choose to be the best we can be, and we need to help others do the same.
For some reason I hesitate to tell him where I live. I don’t want to come across as the spoiled little rich girl that’s fallen low. Even if I am.
Cassian looks at me intently, his eyes more black than purple right then. The purple only shows itself when he’s feeling emotion. A rarity it seems.
But she wasn’t a fool either. Better than anyone she knew how easy it was to become a victim. It didn’t mean you were weak or stupid. It didn’t mean you had done anything wrong. More often than not it meant you were unlucky enough to run smack into a giant douchebag bent on all manner of assholery.
Character is what you do when no one’s looking.
She’d succumbed to him, crumbled like bits of rocky shoreline against the waves.
He didn’t know why – he was certainly no prize for any woman – but she wanted him there. And he just wanted her. He knew that now. He accepted it. He felt lighter owning that fact. He wanted her around him. He wanted her under him, and he wasn’t going to pretend differently anymore.
That’s what I wanted. Something to enrich me, to make me feel better about the things in my life that I could never change.” – Page 56.