“I want you to be my old lady, babe. That’s all I have to offer. I’m a Reaper, and this is my world. You wear my patch, you be my woman and I’ll be your man. We take the good times together and fight through the bad times. No games. That’s everything I’ve got and it’s all yours if you’ll take it.”

“...I know I’ve broken all the rules of all the games, that all the great players and best love calculators recommend that you play, if you want to make someone like you a lot. But that’s okay, because I give up. I’ve got my coffee sitting in my San Francisco cup, I’ve got Kona island and a working beating heart that’s not cold, hard, or numb—very workable and capable of loving, breaking, mending and repeating. So that’s just what I’ll do. Because I’m too tired. Too tired uping all nighting wasting my precious timing wishing it was your heart pumping, wanting me— like I used to want you.”

“I’ll spend my life training just for the moment I have my chance at you. I’ll wait until you think I’ve forgotten today. I’ll wait until you think it was just a dumb guild rat’s threat. After I’m a master, you’ll jump at shadows for a while. But after you jump a dozen times and I’m not there, you won’t jump just once, and that’s when I’ll be there. I don’t care if you kill me at the same time. I’ll trade my life for yours.”

“You didn't break my nose,” he says.“Too bad.”“No, that’s good,” he says. “Because I would've broken yours.”“You’d hit a girl?”“We fight all the time.”

“When we’re there I’ll create a distraction. You have to keep your wits about you, Lady Rogan. Watch me all the time. When I make my move, you make it with me and we run.”I blinked owlishly, hoping I’d heard wrong. “That’s your big plan? A distraction?”He smiled cheekily at me. “Yes. It’s good, right?”“You’re going to get us killed.”“Well, since you got us kidnapped in the first place, I think it’s only fair.”

“You just need to know, I gotta fight to keep what we got so we can build on it, I will. Him, your Dad, you, I don’t give a fuck. In my life, I’ve learned when to let shit go and when to fight. This, babe, what we got, I’ll fight for.”