“Val had a horrific image of Lisa peering through a magnifying glass like a grotesquely teenybopper version of Nancy Drew — in jeggings.”

“When we mated I felt your heart stop beating and it was as if the world had stopped turning. It was only while surrounded by death that I realized I had never felt more alive.”

“When I felt her yield and kiss me back, and realized I had a fighting chance to make this all work out somehow, I had hope.That was far deadlier than any knife or mace.”

“I had a fucking standing ovation going on in my goddamn pants, and it was demanding an encore.”

“As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight.”

“College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.”

“I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be.”