“Truth doesn’t set you free, it shifts your world into something else entirely until you’re back to this: Who am I now that I know who I should be?”

“I said, “But I am, Samuel. I am cursed. You’ve seen my mother. You know that is my destiny.” “I know,” he said. “But Magda? Look up at the stars one last time before this night becomes day.” I turned and felt the world below me drift away until the only thing I saw was a vast ocean of night and stars and moon. Samuel’s lips touched my neck, softly. He whispered, “The stars shine so brightly before they die, Magda. And even after they blink away, we can still see them. Stars don’t fade like people do. In ways, they are forever pieces of an infinite sky. We are the same, Magda. You are my star, and I am yours. There might be a piece of our forever that we cannot see, but we must believe it’s there, waiting at the end.”

“Those words.Samuel’s thirteen words became heartbeats-became my reasons to breathe in- and out of that moment.More than blood, I wanted him.I whispered, “Why did you want to know my name?”“Because my heart needed a name to beat to.”I grinned. “Is your heart always so delirious?”“Would it be a heart if it was anything else?”

“I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.”

“Because I wasn’t anything anymore. Not anythingI love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are--if doing this to others before they do it to us is all our lives are--we’re already dead. Honest to God I feel it, Kade. I’m dead. The hell with me.”

“When I am with you, there is nowhere else I'd rather be. And I am a person who always wants to be somewhere else.”

“I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I’d realized I didn’t have to become them.”