Hannah

“Shh.” I cupped his face in my hands, running my thumbs over his cheeks. I wanted to memorize the feeling of his stubble against my palms, the shape of his lips as they parted. His dark eyelashes, framing eyes that looked up at me with utter trust. With a longing so open and deep it sent an ache through my chest. No looking back. No looking forward. “Then don’t.” I lowered my face to his. “Just be with me now,” I breathed against his lips. “Be.”
― Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda

“When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”
― Riley Sager, Home Before Dark

“I wanted to cup a room in my palm, to tell it to be still, to tell it to hush.”
― Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda

“Even when she walked into the most sickened of houses to purify their energy with copal and smudging of burnt herbs on the walls and hearths, houses so diseased she ordered me to stand outside with the inhabitants, the voices rippled off her like water off silver, her aura as impenetrable as a warrior's gleaming shield. She was a prophet in a land that had been stripped of its gods: a healer of the sick, a beacon in the night. She reached into steel-dark clouds to control the storms of the rainy season, seizing lightning as her reins and bending them to her will to turn harvests into gold. She called the voices to heel and banished them. I was not her.”
― Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda