“He tilted his head, eyes peering deep inside of me in a way that made me feel exposed, like I'd never really been seen before, yet at the same time safe, like he'd never tell a soul what he'd found.”

“You know how your eyes can deceive you at times--how a group of shapes and shadows can take on a certain form and then shift into another? It wasn't really like that; there was no physical change in him, he was exactly the same as he'd always been. I knew every line of his long body and every curl on his disheveled black head. I'd just never seen him before. you know what I'm trying to say, don't you? The change is in the heart.”

“He's staring at me like he's never seen me before. I want to wash my soul in the bottomless blue of his eyes.”

“For all the times he'd fucked me, he'd never fucked me like this. Because this wasn't fucking.It was in his eyes, in his touch, in his kiss. It was in his heartbeat, pulsing against my chest and inside me. It was how he moaned my name, it was how he murmured and pleaded, and it was how his fingers dug into my skin. It wasn't fucking. It was emotion and pure need…He was making love to me.”

“I'd convinced myself it would have been different if he'd been as ugly on the outside as he was on the inside, but he wasn't. He was cruel beauty, a sculpture, a god, and I couldn't tear my eyes from him. I'd seen his expression soften in the dungeon with the whip. I'd do anything to have him look at me like that again, no matter how insane he was.”

“How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.”