“Be gentle with him, Mercy. He's got a heart as big as Texas— he'll die for you without blinking. But he doesn't expect anyone to do the same for him.”

“Content in a way he’d rarely been before Mercy, he simply stroked her until she purred. It delighted him as it always did. “I made you purr.” A lazy yawn. “I’m faking it.”

“Sometimes he hated that voice in his brain, the one that slapped him upside the head anytime he got too stupid. Funny, it happened a lot with Sienna.”

“In my time,” he said, “they believed in witches. Are you a witch, Honor, that you make me say these things to you?” Causing him to rip open wounds that had stayed safely scabbed over for so long that, most of the time, he managed to forget they existed. Her hands, so very, very gentle, continued to hold his face as she tugged him down until their foreheads touched. “I’m no witch, Dmitri. If I was, I’d know how to fix you.”

“Max saw the stranger give him the once-over, recognised it for what it was. Women had been making him offers since before he was legal. And he'd learned to turn them down without hurting their feelings ...”

“He was trying to make me his bed buddy. I declined. He gave chase."[...]"How, exactly, did you 'decline' his offer?""By slitting his throat."The silence in the garage was broken only by the sound of water drip-dripping somewhere in the distance. Sara just stared. So did Ransom. Then the idiot male started laughing hysterically. He laughed so hard he fell off the bike and onto the scarred concrete of the garage floor. Even that didn't stop him.Elena would've kicked him, except he'd probably use the chance to pull her down with him. "Shut up before I do the same to you."He tried to stop laughing. Failed. "Jesus, Ellie. You are awesome!”

“Illium seems far too pretty to be dangerous.” Dmitri’s male beauty, by contrast, was a darker, edgier thing.“No one ever expects him to take out a blade and slice off their balls,” he said with lethal amusement in his tone as he drove them toward the GeorgeWashington Bridge. “He does it with such grace, too.”