Page 116 of Dance of Thorns

And now, it’snot.

At all.

Folding tables and boxes fill the space inside, with giant posters and banners with the bullshit silver and fairy-peach PetalGlow Essentials logo tacked up everywhere. Piles of shitty leggingsand tops cover the tables, and boxes and random bottles of vile-smelling oils litter the ground and trail up the stairs to the loft above.

I'm still confused about my timeline, or what I’m doing here, or how I evengothere. But through the swirling fog, fury ignites in me.

Mother.

Fucking.

Felicity.

The urge to destroy everything I’m looking at, or burn it all to ash, rises in me. But then the fog in my head swirls again, and I find myself grabbing the doorframe.

Fuck this.

Something is wrong with me, and I need to get…

A smile spreads over my face.

Home. I need to get home to Bane.

Where I feel safe. Where I feel everything I never thought I’d feel for that man, including some big emotions that I’m not quite sure what to do with yet. I don't know how to process them.

But I do know I’m going to hold onto them for dear life.

29

BANE

When I was a kid,there was a door at the end of the hall on the third floor of our house. A door that was always locked. I was told never to go near it. No creeping around. No snooping. No eavesdropping.

It wasn’t anything sinister or crazy, just Dad’s office. But even though I knew from a young age that I’d been born to one day lead an underworld empire, my parents wanted to keep me away from it for as long as possible.

They didn’t want me in that office because that office represented an end to innocence and childhood. It represented violence and darkness, death and anger.

It was forbidden. It was a door I wasn't to go near, and definitely not open.

I’ve been thinking about that fucking door a lot recently, and I don’t need a shrink to tell me why.

I married the door a few weeks ago, and blew it right off its hinges.

There are so many reasons I shouldn’t have gone near her—kept my distance.

Instead, I pulled her close. I trapped her. Imarried her, binding her to me, despite our dark history.

Both the way she shattered my heart when Lark died, and the way she barged back into my life, meeting me on that night that could have been my last.

We haven’t spoken about that night on the roof since. I don’t know, maybe she thinks I was up there as part of some master plan to force her to marry me.

I wasn’t.

I was on the edge that night for the same reason she was. Because every year, when the anniversary of Lark's death comes around, it gets harder and harder to pretend it’s in the past, or that I can keep on going.

There’s a black hole inside me that’s slowly sucking in all my light, life, and joy.

Plain and simple, I was on the maintenance deck roof of the Empire State Building that night because it’s a long way down and a real quick stop.