R.A. Sandpiper

But be careful, Kol,” she said. “That girl is nothing but destruction.”

She almost wanted to smile back at him, and that in itself was terrifying

Come at me, I’ll fight back.”

Suri swallowed. “You want me to attack you?”

“Yes,” he said, like it was obvious.

That was the best thing she’d heard all day.

He looks like he wants to kill me," she said.

"I think that's his normal face," Jem murmured to her.

“It’s in the past,” he said, but his fingers twitched with nervous energy. “The less said of it, the better.”

Suri nodded, but her heart juddered with a weird sort of kinship. His voice held a quality she knew well. Rage. Rage sat so deep in his body it could almost be mistaken for resignation.

Sometimes I think you were brought into this world just to torment me.”

Suri blinked and hurt spasmed across her face before she had the chance to mask it. His eyes widened as she scowled at him. “Don’t flatter yourself. I was brought here to torment more than just you.”

She’d never played at love before. The pieces were foreign, the strategies unknown.

He was terrifying in his gorgeousness. He could kill someone with that.

What would it be like? To lose my soul?”

Scilla ate three more bites before answering. “It would not hurt you physically. But it would tear away a part of you. The part that looks for the sun to come through on the other side of the cloud. The part that knows what home feels like. The joy in the small things. The big things, too. Happiness becomes fleeting. You become a shadow of yourself. And if you live in that shadow for too long, it becomes who you are.”

Suri swallowed. It sounded like a small death. Life had little light as it was, and to suck even that away… That could destroy a person, poison their sanity

Love always seemed like surrender to her, choosing to lose a part of yourself in another. It didn’t appeal to her to trust so implicitly in another. There was too much that could go wrong.