It was the most human reason I had ever heard for anything, and it was so far outside the economy of motives I understood that I had spent six months unable to even see it, because I had been looking only for the angle, and there was no angle.

There had only ever been a person.”

The words went into me deeper than any blade any enemy had ever drawn.

I had been stabbed once, years before, in a dispute over territory, and I remembered the specific sensation of it, the cold and then the heat.

This was worse.

Because a blade only tells you that someone wants you dead.

What Juliet had just told me was that I had already, in every way that counted, been living as though I were.