Name: All This Twisted Glory
ISBN: 9780008646271

Tahereh Mafi

All This Twisted Glory

alexys <3

“I’m not implying it, Kamran. I’m delivering the statement to you directly.”

God, he’d wanted her. He’d wanted her with an all-consuming thirst, with the desperation of a man waiting to die.

Fate, he thought bitterly, was only romantic when one was destined to be the hero.

“Never think of me again,” the man said raggedly, the last dregs of energy leaving his body. “Imagine me dead and gone, child. This debt is not yours to bear.”

“How can you say that,” came Cyrus’s quiet reply, “when it was you who asked me to bear it?”

There was no one she felt safer with, and she’d done nothing to deserve his kindness. He’d simply put his faith in her.

He tried to hide a flare of panic as he studied the unnatural curl of her limbs on the ground—but she knew the moment he discerned the bruise on her face, for his eyes widened with undisguised alarm and he all but ran to her, now bolting down the narrow path at a dangerous speed.

Cyrus couldn’t die. Not now. Not yet. Heavens, she thought. Not ever.

He’d been afraid to go near her; he hadn’t been ready to hear her voice, to look into her eyes. He was terrified she’d go and do something brutal, like smile at him.

“Why? Because you’re terribly handsome?”

“Don’t be funny,” he said, breathing hard. “This isn’t funny.”

wish everyone would start dying more often this is the most to happen between them 

“Cyrus,” said Alizeh suddenly, half gasping the word. “Where are you?”

“I’m here,” he said roughly. “I’m right here.”

He only closed his eyes against her hair and fought the desperate crush of his chest, the violence of his affection for her. How she managed to disarm him even now, on the brink of death, he could not understand. She’d wept for his pain, wiped the blood from his eyes, taken an arrow in the back for him. She’d shown him more loyalty and tenderness in two days than he’d ever felt in his life, and he knew then, with a force that drove the air from his lungs, that he would never survive her.

“Be certain of one thing,” Hazan said with quiet menace. “If she doesn’t survive this, you will know the full breadth of my rage. I’ll rip out every bone in your body before I take off your fucking head.” This last part he all but bellowed, the words echoing across the grounds.

“Just like you did before.” She stifled a yawn, her eyes closing. “Do I get one, too?”

Cyrus frowned. “Would that…please you?”

“All right.” He blinked slowly. “You can have a dragon.”

“You would really fight me?” Kamran said, regaining a shade of his earlier temper. “If I challenged you now—you’d be willing to die for him?”

“For her,” Hazan corrected. “Without hesitation. Though you flatter yourself if you think you could best me in a fight. You’ve never truly known me, Kamran, and I’d hate for you to make my acquaintance only as you draw your final breath.”

“You must not resist life when it becomes inconvenient to live. You cannot outrun fear. You should not ignore pain. You will not outlive death.”

“When you suffer,” Rostam went on, “you can choose to endure, or you can choose to overcome.” He gestured around them, to the vast expanse of the meadow. “Here, even in the midst of your discomfort, there existed elements of relief, if only you had bothered to search.”

Hazan stood before her, tall and looming. “All due respect, Your Majesty, you don’t need him. You have me.”

“Everything,” he whispered, releasing her suddenly, backing away as if she’d run him through with a blade. “I want everything.”

All This Twisted Glory

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