Losing Hope Summary Novels & Stories

"I want them undone, Lazarus. Not dead. Not yet. I want their world unravelled strand by strand—so that love is nothing but a dust on their lips." Lazarus showed a lopsided grin. "Well, then, you're going to need something better than anger and painkillers." He stepped aside, walking to a shadowy console. The room was cluttered with ancient gear, jury-rigged from conflicts and destruction that raged on for decades. Lazarus typed in a code on the computer, and the screen came alive—showing a satellite photo from above of the island Kc and Valeria now hold. "Have you any idea what shatters a human being?" Lazarus inquired. "Not violence. Not fear. Hope. You give them hope, you lead them to bel

"We don't know who survived. Who died. What's waiting for us. We go in prepared for anything. Prepared for the worst. But hoping for something better." "Hope," Hailey said bitterly. The word was poison in her mouth. "Always hope. Even when hope gets people killed. Even when hope is a weapon used against us. Even when hope means watching everyone die while we're powerless to stop it." The pack house appeared ahead. Smoke rising. Fires burning. Destruction visible even from a distance. We'd failed again. Been outmaneuvered again. Lost people again. And whatever waited inside that burning building would probably break us completely.

The car screeched violently, halting so abruptly Serafine lurched forward, barely catching herself before her forehead hit the dashboard. “Do you want to know what happened to Hope or you're trying to kill me?!” she snapped, turning to me with anger flashing in her eyes. I shot her a sharp look. Then ordered. “Continue,” She held my gaze for a moment, then looked away, her voice quieter now. “He said Hope's wolf has been surviving on her lifeline. And now both of them are dying because that lifeline has been exhausted.” Silence filled the car. It took a moment for my mind to process all I had just heard. And when it finally did, my chest ached. A deep, crushing weight pressed down on me.

“Do you understand that I wouldn’t have been disappointed if you’d come to me at the beginning, if you’d let me and your family, support you? My disappointment in you isn’t about your mistake, Hope. It’s about the decisions that you made that have caused so much pain for others. You had no right to keep your pregnancy from Levi. None. He is the father of those pups and should have found out about your pregnancy the moment you did. You were wrong to keep that from him. That’s why I’m disappointed in you. If you didn’t want to tell me or your father, fine. I don’t understand it, but I could accept that. But you never, ever keep a man’s pups from him.” I look down. “I know. I’m sorry I disappoi

"But we’ve learned something today. The stars don't own us. We aren't their energy. We are our own Context." I looked at Hope, who was playing with a small, violet-gold spark between her fingers—a fragment of the shroud that had settled on the earth like stardust. "Where to now, Mommy?" she asked. I looked at the world—a messy, beautiful, loud, and un-optimized frontier. "Now," I said, a small, weary smile touching my lips. "We learn how to live in the Silence between the Chapters." The Audit is broken. The Shroud is set. The North is no longer a Target.

By the end, the applause didn’t stop. When they called for me to be the base leader, I shook my head and declined. I gave the position to Zoe. I preferred to focus purely on research rather than trying to manage everyone politically. After the leadership election, my survival plan spread quickly. The once-dead, scorched lands slowly came back to life under the plan’s implementation. Mr. O'Connor, on the other hand, took Janine and Mark away. It wasn’t too long after that I heard Mark died in the heat outside the base. With that, the O’Connor family gradually fell into decline during the apocalypse.

As I had no ties, no settlements and definitely no reminders of anything the had ever given to me. I stretched one hand to the door’s handle, my fingers completely in control though everything about me was shaking. This wasn't a loss for me. It was freedom. At the very least, it would be what I had hoped it would be. And with that, I pushed the door open and walked out of Cassian Hale’s life for good.

“Take it witnessed. Sovereign and witness together. Not to keep it. To pass through it. To empty what they forced into it and return the first design to the body it was stolen from.” Hope is a dangerous thing in collapsing places. It can make you stupid. Reckless. Willing to hear salvation where there is only one more trap. But this did not feel like hope exactly. It felt like pattern. Like the same truth we had been clawing toward all night wearing one final, brutal face: anything split for the sake of control could only be healed by what had been severed returning together.

He had failed every promise he'd ever made. "I couldn't save them." Rowan shook his head gently. "You gave us something more important." Grey frowned. "Hope,” Rowan answered. The word struck harder than any blade. Hope. Maya. The tiny bud upon the Everlasting Tree. Lyon returning home. Hope had finally arrived. Only to be swallowed by flames. Grey closed his eyes briefly. "I'm sorry." The elder squeezed his shoulder. "No." His voice remained remarkably calm. "Don't apologize. Lead us."

Because I love that feisty woman and will spend the rest of my life proving it to her. THE END…. Stay tuned for two epilogues to see how things turn out for Collin and Cassidy.