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“She hated herself. Hated that she had to make this monster believe she only lived to serve him.
Did her boisterous thoughts ring loud, shouting that he’d never have her loyalty?
Did he know that all she wanted was his gruesome death?”

Holy fuck I actually think this is my favorite of the series.

“what will you do when you’re done fighting the world?”
“I highly doubt I’ll survive for long enough to worry about the aftermath.”

“…you don’t have to choose me. Just know that it won’t stop me from choosing you.”

Nico, my love.

“This was it, the chronic condition—the only meaning [she] had left in life… it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.”

“Kill the weak one, kill the dangerous one, it doesn’t matter your particular school of thought. You can always find a reason. Once the idea of death becomes necessary, even palatable, there is always someone the rest of the herd can stand to lose.”

“They’d found synchronicity once, reflective sides of some cosmic mirror game, until she’d killed someone. Now, everything she did had to have a reason. She had altered the rules of her morality, rearranging herself down to the marrow, the basis of her code. Now, everything she did had to be in service to something purposeful. It had to have a meaning. It had to serve an end.”

“Do you miss her?” Parisa asked quietly.
They didn’t have to say her name aloud.
“Sometimes.” He missed Libby Rhodes the way he would miss having electricity. Or his left hand. He did not know how to function without her.

NICO BABY I LOVE YOU 🥺

“You do realize that if Warner sensed for even a second that Kenji was taking advantage of Juliette’s friendship, he’d cut the man’s heart out of his chest and serve it to him. You know that, right? I’m not exaggerating. He’d put it on a plate and everything.”

MY MAN 🥺

“So,” she said, while he drained the remainder of his wine. “You went from someone who couldn’t love you well to someone who can’t love you at all… How does it feel?”

“The same as it always feels,” he replied, pouring another precarious glass and closing his eyes. “Now either sit and have a drink,” he beckoned, taking a sip, “or leave me the fuck alone.”

“But you picked [him]. Why?”
“Because he’s a masochist. And I’m a sadist.”

“I won’t fucking forgive him…. And I won’t forgive anyone else who makes me ask myself if I deserve to live.”

“I feel,” he said, raising his blue eyes to meet Tristan’s. “I feel immensely. But I must, by necessity, do it differently than other people.”

This is so fucking sad and also healing. Goddamn.

“Aren’t you tired? All this work, all this running, none of it you can ever escape; I can feel it in you, around you. You feel nothing anymore, do you? Only erosion, fatigue, depletion. Your exhaustion is all you are.”

“I owed my life [to him], but I didn’t feel happy. All I felt was brokenness. The fear of dirt and nothingness and being alone. The loss [of him]. And something else. The crippling sadness and the incredible guilt of being the one who lived.”

Men ain’t shit.

“The last thing I think is: Achilles.”