“She knew she'd wounded him when he'd least expected it, and her satisfaction lasted until the door had closed behind him. Once he was gone, it ebbed away along with her anger, leaving her with naught but the ashes and embers of a dying hearth fire.”

“Peter knew she was afraid. He ached to tell her that she didn't have to do anything, that he'd protect her from everything. Every instance of fear or pain she had tore him apart inside. She'd had months, but it was still new to him. He wanted to grieve with her for what she'd lost, let her know the utter terror he'd felt at the idea of her being gone from his life before she'd really fully entered it.”

“After he'd gone, she'd suffered a momentary, nearly immobilizing flash of panic--what if the Hunters somehow managed to find her while he was gone?--but it dissipated swiftly, leaving her astonished to realize that she truly trust him to keep her safe, at least from everything besides himself.”

“When she squeezed his arm and told him she had two pies in her buggy, he thought he'd died and gone to heaven.”

“But he was not her Gabriel. Her Gabriel was dead. Gone. Leaving behind only vestiges of him in the body of a harsh and tortured clone. Gabriel had almost broken Julia’s heart once. She was determined she would not let him break her heart for the second time.”

“She had crept away from his bed, leaving him asleep across the jumbled sheets. She'd closed the bathroom door softly behind her. Standing naked before the mirror, she'd stared at the girl she saw there. At the disheveled hair and smeared mascara and lips that he'd kissed. Slowly shaking her head at the image in the mirror, the thought played over and over in her mind like a scratched track on a CD: Why? Why did you do it? Why did you let it happen? Then she'd turned away, covered her face with her hands, and cried. She would never again be the same person. She'd been irreversibly changed.”