Zaire Quotes

He turns me inside out, take me apart, and puts me back together—all in the span of one night.

The devil does indeed wear a beautiful mask.

It’s not the sweet, tender kind of love I always dreamed of, but it’s love. Dark, twisted, and obsessive, it’s both a compulsion and an addiction.

We look at each other--predator and prey, the conqueror and the conquered--and in that moment, I feel an odd sort of connection to him. Like a part of myself is forever altered by what's happening between us.

He stands in the doorway like a dark angel. His hair curls a little around his face, softening the hard perfection of his features. His eyes are trained on my face, and his lips are curved in a slight smile. He's stunning. And utterly terrifying. My instincts had been right--this man is capable of anything.

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, "then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts" - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps [in Zaire].

Instead of a deluded psycho who thinks he's doing the right thing, my new husband is simply a man without conscience

I can feel the darkness inside him. There’s something wrong with him. His outer beauty hides something monstrous underneath.

Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.

. . . the romantic teenager buried deep inside her was weeping at the perversion of her love story. There was no hero in her romance, and the villain made her feel things that she had never imagined she could experience.

There is no beauty without ugliness, just as there’s no happiness without sorrow. We live in a world of contrasts, not absolutes.

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.

The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.

Will you ever let me go?” I murmur, remembering our long-ago conversation. His lips twitch in a faint smile. He remembers too. “No,” he replies softly. “Never.” We lie in silence for a few moments, and then he asks quietly, “Do you want me to let you go?” “No, Julian.” I close my eyes, a smile curving my own lips. “Never.

I’m as relaxed as I’ve been since waking up on this island. If I hadn’t been blindfolded, bound, and sodomized, I would’ve thought I was in a spa.

From the moment I saw you, I knew that I wanted you - more than anyone I've ever wanted in a very long time. And I grew to care about you, even though I knew it was foolish. With time, I hoped that you would feel the same way about me, that if I showed you how good it could be between us, you would realize what you were doing, the mistake that you were making. And you were close, I know...

He was staring at her mouth with what looked like raw hunger, his eyes turning more golden by the second. “Do that again,” he ordered softly, his voice a dark purr from across the table. Mia’s heart skipped a beat.

Sitting with Sindikubwabo [former President of Rwanda in exile in Zaire] as he offered what sounded like a rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight.

Apparently, a conscience is a useful thing to lack.

My moral compass has been gradually tilting off-course, and I’ve been letting it happen.

Nobody heard of Vietnam until there was a war,” Ali once proclaimed. “Nobody heard of Korea until there was a war. Nobody heard of Zaire until I fought there, and paying me is a whole lot cheaper than fighting a war.”9

The predator in me likes that. Her fear, her reluctance—they add a certain edge to the whole thing. It makes it that much sweeter to possess her, to feel her curled up in my arms every night.

The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history.

Korum couldn't understand [Connor's] placidity. If Mia had blushed at the touch of another man, that man's lifespan would've been numbered in minutes.

My captive. My wife. My entire world. I will love her to the end of time, and I will never, ever let her go.

Normal men don’t kidnap girls from the park. They don’t drug them and bring them to a private island.

And I know that’s what this feeling is. Lust. Hormones, pure and simple.

By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed.

You don’t know?” he whispered harshly. “You truly don’t know that you mean everything to me?” Hardly daring to believe her ears, Mia pushed at his chest to put a little distance between them so she could look up at his face. “I do?” “Of course, you do.” His gaze burned into her with an intensity she had never seen before. “How could you doubt it?” “Are . . . are you saying you love me?” she asked tremulously, afraid to even voice such a possibility. What if he said no? What if she’d misunderstood him, and he would now laugh at her silliness? Her chest tightened in anxious anticipation. “Mia, I love you more than life itself,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “If anything happened to you . . . If you were gone, I would not want to go on living. Do you understand me?

How are you, my pet?” he asks, his voice low and intimate, and I feel a hot flush moving over my entire body in response. “I’m fine.” I don’t know what else to say. My butt hurts because you whipped me, but that’s okay because you trained me to enjoy it? Yeah, sure.

Modern communications don't shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say it's shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm. No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.

There was still so much unresolved between them, but in this moment, she couldn't bring herself to care about the way their relationship had started, about all the mutual lies and betrayals. In this moment, she knew only that she loved him, that every part of her longed to be with him.

She nodded shyly, still watching him with her huge blue eyes. Those eyes made him want to slay dragons for her.

Evil is someone who would murder a child,” Beth says, staring at the bright blue water. “Evil is someone who would sell his thirteen-year-old daughter to a Mexican brothel…

I certainly don’t love her. I can’t. Love is for those who are noble and selfless, for people who still have some semblance of a heart.

I don’t want her to be afraid of me, but at the same time, I like having her at my mercy. Her fear calls to the predator within me, turning my desire for her into something darker.

The desire to possess her is violent, all-consuming. It’s an obsession that goes beyond a simple sexual need, though my body burns for her. I don’t just want to fuck her; I want to imprint myself on her, to mark her from the inside out, so that she will never belong to any man but me. I want to own her completely.

I love you," he said softly, his hand stroking her back. "And I'll do anything for you. You know that, right?" Mia smiled, her heart overflowing with emotion. "I love you more..." "That would be impossible," he told her, and the intensity in his voice startled her. "I love you so much it hurts.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin.

Treasure it. Don't let your fears spoil it for you. Don't let your soul get tarnished by what you can't change.

Don’t let your soul get tarnished by what you can’t change.

It’s only now that I realize that there are degrees of agony. That pain can range from devastating to soul-shattering.

it was like to want to hurt someone, to crave their death.

(3) Modern industrial societies provide extensive opportunities for technical training, as medieval Islam did and modern Zaire does not.

The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean-Congo. Sindbis. O’nyongnyong. Nameless São Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.

Hay una cierta satisfacción en la venganza, una sensación de finalización. No deshace el pasado, pero puede ayudar.

Why do you want to talk to me?” I ask, stalling for time. It’s a reasonable question. Any woman in this situation would be wary, not just one who has something to hide. “What do you want?” “You.

The Zaire River, for example, is 2,900 miles long and has a volume of water second only to that of the Amazon, but its rapids and waterfalls near the sea prevent ocean-going ships from reaching inland.

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.

At this writing there are six known species of Ebola. The six Ebola sisters. In order of discovery, the six Ebolas are named Zaire Ebola, Sudan Ebola, Reston Ebola, Taï Forest Ebola, Bundibugyo Ebola, and Bombali Ebola.

After a moment or two a man in brown crimplene looked in at us, did not at all like the look of us and asked us if we were transit passengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit passengers then we were supposed to be in the other of the two rooms. We were obviously very crazy and stupid not to have realized this. He stayed there slumped against the door jamb, raising his eyebrows pointedly at us until we eventually gathered our gear together and dragged it off down the corridor to the other room. He watched us go past him shaking his head in wonder and sorrow at the stupid futility of the human condition in general and ours in particular, and then closed the door behind us. The second room was identical to the first. Identical in all respects other than one, which was that it had a hatchway let into one wall. A large vacant-looking girl was leaning through it with her elbows on the counter and her fists jammed up into her cheekbones. She was watching some flies crawling up the wall, not with any great interest because they were not doing anything unexpected, but at least they were doing something. Behind her was a table stacked with biscuits, chocolate bars, cola, and a pot of coffee, and we headed straight towards this like a pack of stoats. Just before we reached it, however, we were suddenly headed off by a man in blue crimplene, who asked us what we thought we were doing in there. We explained that we were transit passengers on our way to Zaire, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses. 'Transit passengers? he said. 'It is not allowed for transit passengers to be in here.' He waved us magnificently away from the snack counter, made us pick up all our gear again, and herded us back through the door and away into the first room where, a minute later, the man in the brown crimplene found us again. He looked at us. Slow incomprehension engulfed him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation. He leaned back against the wall, frowned, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. 'You are in the wrong room,' he said simply. `You are transit passengers. Please go to the other room.' There is a wonderful calm that comes over you in such situations, particularly when there is a refreshment kiosk involved. We nodded, picked up our gear in a Zen-like manner and made our way back down the corridor to the second room. Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off.

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and. Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the "dirty war" of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.

Lathan was his. The man owned his heart and his soul. And nothing would stop Zaire from following him into the darkness that plagued him. Even if it meant there was no coming back. Without Lathan, there was nothing worth coming back to.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where

What’s your name?” The creature practically purred the question at her. His voice was low and smooth, completely unaccented. His nostrils flared slightly, as though inhaling her scent. “Um . . .” Mia swallowed nervously. “M-Mia.” “Mia,” he repeated slowly, seemingly savoring her name. “Mia what?” “Mia Stalis.” Oh crap, why did he want to know her name? Why was he here, talking to her? In general, what was he doing in Central Park, so far away from any of the K Centers? Breathe, Mia, breathe. “Relax, Mia Stalis.” His smile got wider, exposing a dimple in his left cheek. A dimple? Ks had dimples? “Have you never encountered one of us before?

Allí, como las olas en las Hébridas, la maleza se agita continuamente. Pero ningún viento surca el cielo. Y los altos árboles primitivos oscilan eternamente de un lado a otro con un potente resonar. Y de sus altas copas se filtran, gota a gota, rocíos eternos. Y en sus raíces se retuercen, en un inquieto sueño, extrañas flores venenosas. Y en lo alto, con un agudo sonido susurrante, las nubes grises corren por siempre hacia el oeste, hasta rodar en cataratas sobre las ígneas paredes del horizonte. Pero ningún viento surca el cielo. Y en las orillas del río Zaire no hay ni calma ni silencio.

I groan, pulling the blanket over my head. My Russian stalker is back—and cooking breakfast in my house. After a minute, I convince myself to get up and go through my usual morning routine. Yes, my husband’s killer fucked me again last night—and made me come—but the world didn’t end, and I have to act accordingly.

And by the shores of the river Zaire there is neither quiet nor silence. "It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall and the rain fell upon my head—and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.

But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.

Thanks, Marisa. You're the best sister a girl can ask for," Mia told her sincerely. "I know--and very modest too.

His words wash over me like a warm ocean wave, bringing with it trepidation and a kind of unhealthy excitement.

further,

Whoever said hell is hot was wrong. Hell is cold. Russian-winter cold.

I wanted to be so deep inside I’d never come out, to take her so hard I’d leave my imprint on her flesh.

The insanity of my life has reached a whole new level.

Organizing a wedding is not all that different from planning a hit, I’ve come to realize.

One can live in the darkness and see the light of the sun; it’s even brighter that way.

I realized I’d been trying to protect myself from the agony of losing you. Trying to keep myself from loving you so it wouldn’t destroy me. Except it was too late. I was already in love with you. I had been for a long time. Obsession, addiction, love—it’s all the same thing. I can’t live without you, Nora. Losing you would destroy me. I can survive anything but that.

Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia’s citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today’s northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running. Tragically,

He's not going to flip out again, is he?" Jessie sounded scared. "What? No, of course not," Mia said automatically. "Uh-huh," Jessie said doubtfully. "He wont," Mia said with confidence, looking directly at Korum. She knew perfectly well that he could hear her. He stared back at her. His eyes still had those dangerous golden flecks in them, but one corner of his mouth tilted up, a ghost of a smile stealing across his face. Mia continued looking at him, her own eyes narrowed, and the smile became a full-blown grin, transforming his features from merely gorgeous to out-of-this-world sexy. Then he turned away and continued speaking to Edgar, as though nothing had happened. "Holy shit," Jessie breathed, her eyes huge. "You did it! Mia, you f***ing did it..." "Did what?" "You tamed a K.

He is the one wife belonging to many white men. Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.

It’s an obsession that goes beyond a simple sexual need, though my body burns for her. I don’t just want to fuck her; I want to imprint myself on her, to mark her from the inside out, so that she will never belong to any man but me.

Children are amazing. They can make us see the world as we once did… make us feel that sense of joy and wonder that the passing years steal from us. They’re the closest thing we have to a time machine—or at least a window to the past.

Holy shit. So this is what it feels like to be attracted to someone. It’s not rational, not logical. There’s no meeting of minds and hearts involved. No, the urge is basic and primitive. My body has sensed his on some animal level, and it wants to mate.

(...) Y los árboles primitivos oscilan eternamente de un lado a otro con un potente resonar. Y de sus altas copas se filtran, gota a gota, rocíos eternos. Y en sus raíces se retuercen, en un inquieto sueño, extrañas flores venenosas. Y en lo alto, con un agudo sonido susurrante, las nubes grises corren por siempre hacia el Oeste, hasta rodar en cataratas sobre las ïgneas paredes del horizonte. Pero ningún viento surca el cielo. Y en las orillas del río Zaire no hay ni calma, ni silencio. [Silencio - Fábula]

I don’t know how long he fucks me like this—or how many times I come from the battering force of his thrusts. All I know is that by the time he reaches his peak, shuddering over me, I’m hoarse from screaming and so sore that it hurts when he pulls out of me, the wetness of his semen stinging my abraded flesh.

The lawyer asks for her phone number, and she gives it, but I can see it’s mostly out of politeness. Her cheeks are perfectly pale—there isn’t even a hint of the color that floods her face in my presence—and her body language speaks of indifference. Joe Levinson doesn’t excite her, and that’s a good thing. It means he gets to go home alive.

now known to exist in substantial numbers in the rain forests of Zaire—the total population is estimated at perhaps thirty thousand—yet its existence wasn’t even suspected until the twentieth century. The large flightless New Zealand bird called the takahe had been presumed extinct for two hundred years before being found living in a rugged area of the country’s South Island. In 1995 a team of French and British scientists in Tibet, who were lost in a snowstorm in a remote valley, came across a breed of horse, called the Riwoche, that had previously been known only from prehistoric cave drawings. The valley’s inhabitants were astonished to learn that the horse was considered a rarity in the wider world.

At some point, when it’s safe.” “And when will that be?” “I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out.” “We?” A bitter laugh escapes my throat. “Are you under the impression that this is some kind of partnership? That we kidnapped me together?” Peter’s gaze hardens. “It can be a partnership, Sara. If you want it to be.” “Oh, really?” I push his hand off my knee. “Then turn this fucking plane around, partner. I want to go home.

He was miffed because he hadn’t been the center of all my attention the night before. Pathetic. It would be enough to make me laugh, except he was also accusing me of dereliction of duty. I couldn’t let my own Source believe I wouldn’t do my duty. It would be difficult for him to do his job if he thought I wouldn’t be doing mine. Plus it was irritating. I drained the last of my coffee. Karish looked horrified. “Zaire, woman, how can you gulp it down like that when it’s still hot?” Because I was a Shield. I gestured at the waiter. “You’re left-handed,” I said as my mug was filled. “But you use your right when you eat. You drank three mugs of ale and ate two bowls of the stew. You enjoyed it very much, even though you don’t like turnip.” “Actually,” he interrupted me curtly, “I’m allergic to turnip.” I almost smiled. Was he trying to shake my confidence? Amateur. “If you were allergic to turnip you wouldn’t have touched the stew at all.” Wouldn’t want hives defiling that perfect skin. “You eat your bread like a woman—” “What the hell does that mean?” “You tear it off in chunks instead of biting into the whole slice. And you slather all sides with butter. That’s disgusting, by the way.” Butter was not icing and shouldn’t be treated as such. “You sat straight in your chair, as you are now, without touching the back, despite certain fatigue. I would guess you spent some of your formative years with a wooden rod up your spine.” He leaned back in his chair, then, crossing his arms. “But for much of the evening you had your right foot wrapped around one leg of your chair. Your mother wouldn’t approve.” Another slow sip of glorious coffee. He looked at me, frowning. And then the frown turned into a smile that I didn’t trust at all. “You’re staring,” I pointed out tartly.

A rise often falls into the blind spot of vision, and so we tell the stories that I have in this book because we are hardwired not to be able to glimpse them. Like a type II error in statistics, a “false negative,” when we have the evidence but can’t see that an alternative hypothesis is correct, these rises are a perceptual miss. We tell the story of Muhammad Ali’s eighth-round win against George Foreman that night in Kinshasa, Zaire, even though we know how it ends, for while it happened, no one could see it. Ali upset most of the 60,000-person crowd who favored him as he spent the first seven rounds, 180 seconds long each, learning against the ropes while enduring brutal frontal attacks from Foreman, known to have bored a hole in his practice punching bag. No amount of screaming from his trainers could get Ali off the ropes, never mind the shouting of those sitting near the ring, from George Plimpton to Norman Mailer—counting how many right-hand leads Ali took, and remembering how Ali, being pummeled, still managed to whisper to Foreman in the seventh round, “Is that all you got, George?” 16 Yet no one but the fighters in the ring could sense it—there is a difference between being beaten and being strengthened, for as it happens, it is hard to perceive.

Winters?” I prod, amused. He tears his eyes away from her. “Oh, yes. It was a pleasure,” he mutters, shaking my hand, and before I can say another word, he strides back into his office and shuts the door behind him. As I promised Rosa, after the meeting I take her shopping on the Magnificent Mile—also known as Michigan Avenue. As she tries on a bunch of dresses at a department store, I take a seat next to the fitting room and check my email again. This

De Beers operated a selling cartel for diamonds by using their control of the central selling organisations to manage prices by manipulating supply and demand. In the past, when a single country, such as Zaire, tried to break away and sell their diamonds independently, De Beers would flood the market with similar diamonds to drive down prices for Zaire, forcing them to return to the cartel. But

Do you plan to marry him?" Doran asked. "What? No!" Why would I do that? "Have children with him?" "Definitely not." It was unlikely, within a Pair, both of us channeling. Channeling and Shielding tended to prevent conception. And even if it were possible, Zaire, what a bad combination. With our luck any children would have my looks and his mood swings.

Who has the moral high ground? Fifteen blocks from the whitehouse on small corners in northwest, d.c. boys disguised as me rip each other’s hearts out with weapons made in china. they fight for territory. across the planet in a land where civilization was born the boys of d.c. know nothing about their distant relatives in Rwanda. they have never heard of the hutu or tutsi people. their eyes draw blanks at the mention of kigali, byumba or butare. all they know are the streets of d.c., and do not cry at funerals anymore. numbers and frequency have a way of making murder commonplace and not news unless it spreads outside of our house, block, territory. modern massacres are intraethnic. bosnia, sri lanka, burundi, nagorno-karabakh, iraq, laos, angola, liberia, and rwanda are small foreign names on a map made in europe. when bodies by the tens of thousands float down a river turning the water the color of blood, as a quarter of a million people flee barefoot into tanzania and zaire, somehow we notice. we do not smile, we have no more tears. we hold our thoughts. In deeply muted silence looking south and thinking that today nelson mandela seems much larger than he is.

With this man, I’m not in control, and that knowledge scares me.

As soon as I lie down next to him, he pulls me against him, curving his body around me from the back and covering us both with a blanket. I let out a sigh of enjoyment as his warmth surrounds me. The man is like a furnace, generating so much heat that I instantly feel toasty, the ever-present chill inside my apartment forgotten.

You’re very direct, aren’t you?” she whispered, staring up at me, and I told her I didn’t have time for games. It was true—if only because the lust I felt was more intense, more violent than anything I’d known before. At that moment, I would’ve done anything to have her, crossed any line... committed any crime.

It’s like the fates are conspiring to keep me in Moscow. It’s not enough that Russia has winters brutal enough to decimate its enemies’ armies; now it has spy-detaining traffic, too.

If Yulia Tzakova ever crosses my path again, she will pay. She will pay for everything.

All I can do is sit and grieve for something I never had—and now would never know.

Everything inside me screams that she’s mine—mine to fuck, mine to punish in any way I choose. Nobody else will lay hands on her ever again.

I chose the latter. I killed, but that’s not who I am. I don’t let that act define me. It happened, and it’s done. It’s in the past. I can’t change the past, so I’m not going to dwell on it. And neither should you. Your present, your future—that’s what matters.

who speaks next.

He projected American power through regional allies like Iran, Zaire, and Indonesia, and turned a blind eye as dictators in those countries oppressed and looted with abandon.

A moment of wordless communication passes between us, and I know. I know what he can’t say right now. I know he would always come for me. I know he would kill for me. I know he would die for me.

I love you even though I see you for what you are—even though I know what you’re doing to me. I love you because I’m no longer capable of not loving you… because you’re now part of me, for better or for worse.

By warning me, she sealed her fate, and it’s too late to back out now.

My tormentor carried out his threat. He kidnapped me, and I may never see home again.

Obsession is not love, and that’s what he feels for me: a dark, terrible obsession that ruins and destroys.