“Whatever,” he said. “Like you care. I’m gone. Have a nice motorcycle ride back to your church where you can have fun pretending to be some kind of saint we all know you aren't.”

“I’m currently imagining a few creative ways of causing you extraordinary amounts of pain.”Kingsley raised his chin. Mere inches separated their faces.“Stop flirting. You know we don’t have time for that.”

“Nora— Forgive me for copyediting, but it must be said—you have raped the semicolon yet again. Stop it. It wasn’t asking for it no matter how it was dressed. If you don’t know how to use punctuation then do away with it altogether, write like Faulkner and we’ll pretend it’s on purpose.”Bite me, Easton, Nora said to herself as she corrected her sexually compromised semicolon in chapter eighteen. Seriously, bite me.”

“I know you want to fuck me. And I know you wish you didn’t. So how about we compromise and you can sit here and say, ‘No, Nora,’ ‘Don’t, Nora,’ ‘Stop, Nora,’ and I’ll ignore all those protests and slide right down on your cock anyway? And I’ll do it because no and don’t and stop aren’t your safe word. So you can finally get fucked and still sleep like a baby in your big lonely bed tonight feeling all clean and shiny and virginal because, after all, you did say ‘no’ and that awful Nora Sutherlin just wouldn’t listen.”

“You are my heart,” he said. He’d said those very words to her that morning. But that morning, they’d sounded affectionate and playful. Now he said them as if he were stating a fact of anatomy. “I will not lose you. I’m sending you away to keep you safe. Do you understand? Say ‘Yes, sir.’”Nora nodded and swallowed a sudden lump in her throat.”Yes, sir.”Soren bent his head and kissed her long and slow before pulling back.”

“You have no idea who he is, Suzanne. If you judge him by his actions, you will never know him.”

“I’ll come back,” she promised. “I’ll always come back to you.”“I know,” he said with cold, calm arrogance. “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t let you go.”“Believe it. It’s true.” She took a step back. Then another. “Always.”“Eleanor, if you have any mercy in that dark heart of yours, when you leave right now, you willwalk and not run.”... ...crawl and she didn’t fly.She ran. Down the hall she ran as if the hounds of hell nipped at her heels. She ran as if Godhimself had ordered her to. She ran as if her life depended on it and in that moment she mighthave sworn that it did.She didn’t know why she ran. She didn’t know who or what waited for her in the White Room.She only knew she had to get there as fast as she could and whoever it was, he was worthrunning to.”