Cassie Bendix > Recent Status Updates

“Unwoman” - steals my breath every time…😮‍💨

Liv Zander does it again - her books are so dark, you’re left questioning your sanity/character…is something wrong with me for liking this?? And yet I’m devouring these stories and characters. Deep & Dark & Flawed. I am eating this shit up.

This makes 3 for 3 - loving every series she’s written.

“I used to fear this. An unending succession of losses. An infinite lineage of goodbyes. Every hello carries it’s goodbye folded inside it, like a letter you know you’ll have to open someday.
But hello comes first.
An endless succession of life, of love.
Of now.”

“Like coming home.”

“I’ll always be your home.”

😭😭😭 and to think I thought I was going to get out of this unscathed by tears.

Seriously…how am I supposed to live life right now. Putting this down is impossible

Chapter 20 - FUCKING HELL

“You can’t have love without embracing grief. Pain is the price we pay for participating in life. And if you’re not willing to pay for that, then maybe…then maybe you’re a corpse after all. Existing somehow, yes. But not living.”

Ok, that had me gasping.

“You can’t have love without embracing grief. Pain is the price we pay for participating in life.”

“Every headstone marks someone who would cherish what you’re afraid of.”

Gahhhhh!!! Aaaahhhhh my gaaawwwwd it’s so fucking good!!! It’s melting my face off!

“We both know dying is easy. It’s a single moment. One decision, and then…it’s done. And you never have to feel the weight of what comes after. But living for someone? Waking up every morning, even when it hurts, even when you can’t fathom to keep going? Try that. If you want to impress me.”

“I’m not sure exhaustion is the right word for the particular weariness of an immortal arguing with his mortal wife about whether love is worth the pain it guarantees.”

“The kind of unresolved quiet that settles between husbands and wives, I’ve observed more than once, hardening into what will one day become distant silence.”

It’s impossible to jot down every breath stealing line this book lays down. It’s constant, a rushing river of poetry.

“I absorb his soul, the faint, luminous thread that detached from his body like steam from a cup left out in winter. It curls into me, carries me through me, until it expands into the peaceful, vast stillness of all.”

Ugh! 🥺😭🫠

“Now is all we’re ever given.”

“What is now but the thinnest sliver of time between what was and what will be? A single speck mid-fall, too brief to hold?”

“Love and loss are on the same coin — one side warmth, one side ache — but the value never changes. And to carve out the grief would be to erase the love that made the memory worth living. A thousand times over.”

Daron 😢

“Daron spoke a lot about you in his final moments. You always joked with him about death, he said, even when rot climbed his fingers, replacing fear with laughter. And by the time Death came, he embraced me as…his sisters husband. A relative most welcome.”

Daron 😢

“Little Elara, crouched among headstones, making a home out of the very stillness mortals fear, moving through death like it’s a room she belongs in - my domain, my purpose.”

Vale’s first POV - YES 🙌

Lock me up and throw away the key so I can devour what’s left of this story. It’s got me by the throat.

“Mortals are obsessed with it. Love.
It’s a sickness of the mind. A voluntary lunacy. They chase it, sing of it, long for it - a deluded sentiment they crave as if it could ever end in anything other than pain. To love is to open your heart to the blade of grief, offering it a bloody sheath to land in before it cracks under the agony of loss.
Love is madness.”

“Annoying and stupidly alluring” Vale has used this description more than once to describe Elara and I fucking love it

“I ought to sneer. The fact that I can’t seems far more damning then any vow I’m about to speak.”

Vale. Vale vale vale. Aye 🪭

“Little Elara, crouched among headstones, making a home out of the very stillness mortals fear, moving through death like it’s a room she belongs in - my domain, my purpose.”

Vale’s first POV - YES 🙌

“Wed him. Bed him. Slit his throat and break the curse.”

Oh this is just too good. How on earth am I supposed to put this down?!

“We think we have her!”

WHO?!? WHAT?!?

Ya I’m so sat. Clear my calendar.

Vale…to love or to hate…oh…my…

“Tell me Elara, did his pain make a lover of you where mine doesn’t?”

Oh the dilemma of this situation…aye!

Gah! Oh boy…we’re getting somewhere…I think. I don’t trust the story. I know there’s more. So much more.