Mercy laughed. “You have to excuse them—boys suffer from an incurable disability.”
“What?”
“Testosterone.

Dorian’s going to love this.”

She glared. “I swear to God, you tell him, and I’ll” — what the hell could you threaten an alpha with?—“I’ll tell Hawke you want to go on daily bonding runs with him.

Sentinel meeting tonight,” Ria told her. “At Lucas's place.”
“Time?”
...
“Seven. Sascha's doing dinner.”
“God save us all.” Sascha had decided she liked cooking. Unfortunately, cooking didn't like her back.

I have something for you.”
“Yeah? What? Is it shiny?”
They both waited until Indigo had jogged away before resuming their conversation. “So,” Riley asked, “what have you got for me?”
Taking his hand, she placed it palm-down over her heart. It would hurt like a bitch, she thought, but he was hers to protect as much as she was his. “Me.” And she opened up her soul, laid herself bare.

When he put the old-fashioned mechanical toy on her palm, she stopped breathing. It was a tiny representation of an atom, complete with colored ball bearings standing in for neutrons, protons, and on the outside, arranged on arcs of fine wire, electrons. Turning the key on the side made the electrons move, what she’d thought were ball bearings actually finely crafted spheres of glass that sparked with color. A brilliant, thoughtful, wonderful gift for a physics major.

“Why magnesium?” she asked, identifying the atomic number of the light metal. His hand on her jaw, his mouth on her own. “Because it’s beautifully explosive, just like my X.

The longer you live, the more mistakes you make. And the more sorrows you carry.