Tahereh Mafi

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Shatter Me comes All This Twisted Glory, the highly anticipated third novel in the Persian inspired mythology This Woven Kingdom series

All This Twisted Glory (This Woven Kingdom)

I love when they roast each other💀😂

Sophia

So when he'd fled the palace on a mysterious - and likely nefarious - quest, she'd felt compelled to follow.

Of course Cyrus knew he was being followed.

She possessed all the subtlety of a dragon in slumber.

She’d been unable to look away as he performed this small task, fascinated by his unshakable bearing. Just hours ago he’d been battered nearly to death by the devil only to be dealt further blows by Alizeh herself, his mother, and the threat of violence against his home. These strikes had rained down on him one after another without pause and still, he remained composed. He wore a slight smile as he spoke quietly to a footman, his mannerisms easy but firm.

For as long as he lived he feared he’d know the scent of her, the sound of her walking toward him. She was a fool to think otherwise.

She could not know his dilemma: that her inexpert shadow infuriated him even as it soothed him, that he wanted to vanish even as he couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning her here, in the frigid dark.

He wanted her closer than he could express in words, wanted her bare and trembling in his arms, wanted to excoriate these sensations from his skin.

He wanted to lop off his own head and hurl it into the river.

It was a torturously long moment before she said –

Cyrus swallowed. “Yes,” he whispered.

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

Alizeh was the fulfillment of his most desperate, undisclosed desire. The constant, gnawing ache inside him – this pitiful need that grew only more fraught in the wake of every darkness that devoured him – He longed for her warmth, for her radiance. She’d been, from the first moment she’d wandered into his dreams, an enduring flame in the endless night, his only haven in the madness that inhaled him. This was his real weakness, and the devil had marked him easily.

Cyrus had not slept since first laying eyes on Alizeh. He hadn’t dared.

He’d never forget the first time he saw her on that calamitous night, the way she’d stepped out from behind the dressing screen. She’d appeared in the golden lamplight of Miss Huda’s bedroom like some impossible vision. Only when she’d lifted her eyes to his face and the sight of her had nearly killed him did Cyrus realize just how artfully he’d been outmaneuvered.

He’d absorbed the blow with immaculate outward calm, letting the bomb explode inside him, liquefying his core. This inner destruction birthed a staggering, terrifying anger he’d been almost unable to conceal.

He felt he’d gone mad, swinging wildly between desire and fury and disgust and fear, hardly able to manage himself or his reactions to her. He knew at once he’d been tricked; he knew at once she was an instrument of the devil, sent to ruin him. And yet, he weakened each time she looked in his direction. His need grew only more explosive as she solidified into someone real; always he desired another glance, another accidental graze of her skin –

He was terrified to ever dream of her again.

Panic inhaled him. He felt blind with it, blind with madness. Alizeh whispered something incomprehensible against his neck, and he closed his eyes against a destructive swell of emotion, wishing desperately that he’d never been born. He didn’t realize at any point that he’d stumbled, that he’d lost his footing, or that they were falling – not until he felt the wind, like a heavy hand, rise up beneath them.

“Don’t worry, angel,” he said quietly. “You won’t have to.”

All This Twisted Glory (This Woven Kingdom) quotes

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