Novel & Cerita The Novel Unbroken

"What do you gain?" "Nothing. Everything." I moved to the window beside her. "I've been where you are. Broken. Controlled. Used as a weapon. Someone helped me. Now I help others. That's how it works." "What if we can't be fixed? What if we're too broken?" "Then we learn to live broken. Find strength in the cracks. Build something new from the pieces." I met her eyes. "You're not alone. None of you are. Not anymore."

"Unbreakable. Most people who went through what you did would be curled up in a corner somewhere, too broken to fight back. But here you are, organizing evidence and planning your counterattack. That is a Sterling trait if I ever saw one." "I do not feel very strong," Cora admitted. She looked around at her tiny apartment, at all the reminders of her failed marriage. "I feel like I have been shattered into a million pieces." "Being broken and being unbreakable are not opposites," Caleb said from where he was photographing documents with his phone. "You can be both at the same time. Broken by what happened to you, but unbreakable in your core. In your will to survive."

When I woke up that day my life ended. They say that I saved my squad's life that day and for that, I got a medal of honor. But no medal can make up for what I lost that day. My leg. I am supposed to be a hero but I am not, I am a broken man. Nobody wants a broken man, they need a hero. A broken man does not get the girls, he gets to be lonely. My only wish now is to meet someone that is going to take me for who I am, a broken soldier.

"You're not giving up now. Not after everything you've survived to get here." "What if I can't handle any more? What if I've reached my limit?" "You haven't. You're stronger than you think." "I don't feel strong. I feel broken." "Broken people don't work eighteen hour days perfecting every detail of a collection. Broken people don't stand up to board members who doubt them. Broken people don't survive what you've survived and keep fighting." Lucien shifted slightly so he could see my face. "You're exhausted and overwhelmed and pregnant—"

I'd worn the black and stood at the pyre and felt nothing but a strange, guilty quiet — like a door somewhere in the house had finally stopped slamming. I had spent my whole life deciding to be his opposite. When he died, I started running Dark Moon a different way. Maybe that was half of why I'd carried Nora and Lily out of that house at all. I'd looked at the two of them, the older one shielding the younger with her own thin body, and I'd seen something I recognized from a long way down. "I like them already," Olivia said. "I'd like to talk to her. To both of them."

"When I was a girl. Before Margaret. Before Sergei. Before any of it. I dreamed about mountains and rivers and open skies." "What happened?" "Life." She turned to face me. "Life happened. And I let it break me." "You're not broken." "I'm shattered." She held up her hands. "Look at me. I'm trembling. I haven't stopped trembling in thirty years." "That's not broken. That's human." "Same thing." "No." I walked to her. Took her hands. "Being human means being afraid. Being broken means giving up. You haven't given up." "I've been hiding."

He stayed up with me through the night when I couldn't sleep, he fed me all the junk food that my heart desired, and he was basically my own personal therapist. Meanwhile, Elle was an inspiration to me. She told me the story of how she got her heart broken once too, and then she turned that pain into a song. She was the one who told me I should turn my pain into art. So last year, I started writing a novel. I wrote about our love story, about our summer together. Writing that novel actually helped me move on with my life. It was ironic to think that the love story that broke me apart was also what put me back together.

I nodded, and we walked together in silence going back to his house. “Which pack are you from?” he broke the silence, and his question broke my heart. I had no home anymore and no parents. That pack is no longer my home. Golden Moon pack is no longer my home, not after what happened. It hurts thinking this way. I grew up in that pack, I had friends there, a family and now they are all gone. Well, most of them. He must have seen my sadness, and he spoke. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” He tells me.