“I’m going to ask you a question,” I said. “And I want an answer this time, no dodging and no playing cryptic. Is the reason you’re leaving because you need to look for Nicholas, or because you want to get away from me?”Daniel looked me square in the eye, unblinking. “The first thing accomplishes the second, now doesn’t it?”

“He leveled his eyes at mine through the darkness. “You asked me before if I could take away your memories. I can, and I wanted to. But taking them away wouldn’t have stopped what you were feeling. It just would’ve kept you from being able to understand. In the end the only thing I could do was let you go through whatever you had to go through and hope you were strong enough to make it to the other side. Turns out you’re pretty damn tough.”

“I’m by myself,” she said finally. “No family to speak of.”“I see.” Leaning forward again, he rested his arms against the table. “That must be rather difficult.”“Sometimes.”“And lonely, I imagine. Perhaps that is why you came here tonight?”Her jaw popped under the strain of maintaining decorum. “First: I said I was alone, not lonely. There's a big difference. And second: is that really why you think I'm here?”“I do not know what to think. I know you must have reasons for being here other than what you have already hinted at. Reasons important enough to make an otherwise intelligent woman not only bring food to a stranger so late at night, but also accept his invitation to sit inside an empty motel room without a second thought.”“Why don't you just call me a hooker while you're at it?”

“How do you think I got to this point? Each day another step on an unending staircase? Months of searching, dredging through the filthiest places you could ever imagine, all in an attempt to find knowledge in the words of degenerates? To weed truths from the mouths of liars? You have no cause to judge my actions, and more than that you have no right. You do not know the things I have been through or the evil of the man I am searching for. He stole everything I had. Tortured me to the point of madness and left me with nothing. I am destroyed. All I could have had is gone, and there will never be an opportunity to regain it. Do you truly think a man like that deserves to be left alive? After all he has done? Or that, given the chance, he would not do the same thing to others?”

“When he’d woken that morning to find her gone, he’d used the time alone to clean himself up in every sense of the word. Decisions about his future had been part of it, but there'd been more, too. Because in all the time they’d known one another he’d been completely unconcerned with his appearance. Now, however, he wanted to show her the man he truly was. More than that, the man she’d helped him become: healed, strong, capable. No longer in the shadows, but bathed in light. No longer in need of saving or protecting or anything. Except her.”

“Open your eyes, baby. Look at me.” He pressed his forehead down to meet mine, my eyelids fluttering open at his command. “Look at me and tell me you don’t want it.”I peered up at him with unsteady breaths, hearing his throat work when I tilted my lips to graze his. The contact was feather light, my heart hammering through my chest at the feel of it. “I’m looking,” I breathed against him.“Good. Because right now, all I want to do is rip your clothes off and make you come until you can’t stand, and I want your eyes on me the whole time, are we clear?”-Jackson and Emma”

“In the abyss you make your own light.”