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Xaden, while brooding and bossy, dangerous and lethal, is a toe-curling sight that makes my pulse quicken. But Xaden laughing, his head thrown back with a smile curving his mouth, is drop-dead beautiful. My stupid, foolish heart feels like there’s a fist around it, squeezing tight. There is nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice, nothing I wouldn’t give to have one unguarded moment with this man I’m going to be tethered to for the rest of our lives. This has to be Tairn. It just…has to.
In this passage from Chapter 22, Violet is still trying to talk herself out of acting on her attraction to Xaden. The intense attraction she feels, shown through this quotation’s tactile imagery of her “pulse quicken[ing]” and her heart feeling “squeez[ed] tight,” points to the difficult she is already having in reconciling her needs with what she knows she must do to survive. Although she says there is “nothing she wouldn’t sacrifice” to be with Xaden, at this point she doesn’t fully mean it. She’s still meaningfully concerned that being with Xaden could lead her to compromise, or even abandon, her most important personal values. Later in the novel she throws caution to the wind, but here she’s still weighing the emotional cost of her connection with him against her broader goals.
I retreat a few steps so I don’t act on the overwhelming urge to punch him in the face.
“You’re working with our enemy.”
“Did you ever once stop to think that sometimes you can start out on the right side of a war and end up on the wrong one?”
In this exchange with Xaden from Chapter 35, Violet confronts the reality that Xaden has been working with people she and her family still consider the enemies of their homeland. She and Xaden are operating based on different information, here. Violet briefly believes that Xaden has actually been working against the riders and Navarre the entire time. Xaden, however doesn’t see his actions as traitorous because he knows about all the internal corruption within Navarrian leadership. The fact that Violet and Xaden are arguing over this shows how aligned their values are: both believe that the most ethical thing to do is to act for the greater good, and both believe they are doing it. In order to move forward, Xaden has to baldly confess everything he has done and sacrifice Violet’s trust in him, risking losing her love. Violet has to sacrifice all that she has previously known to be true about the conflict between Poromiel and Navarre, and choose to put her faith in Xaden despite his divided loyalties.
Told you I knew better poison masters,” I tell her softly. “You weren’t healed. You were mended.”
“Brennan?” She stares at her brother in open-mouthed shock. Brennan just grins and opens his arms. “Welcome to the revolution, Violet.”
In this moment in the novel’s final paragraph, Violet confronts the personal cost of her pursuit of power and the sacrifices required to align with a cause larger than herself. Everything she knows is turned on its head when she sees her brother Brennan seemingly back from the dead. It’s the most conclusive proof imaginable that she has made the right choice in allying herself with Xaden’s side, as she knows Brennan is a good and moral person. In addition to justifying Violet’s own sacrifice of her comparatively straightforward life and loyalties at Basgiath, this final interaction also shows how much Brennan has sacrificed. He has given up his home, his family, and his identity in Navarre in order to fight with Xaden and his allies against the venin. Joining the “revolution” is likely to demand even greater sacrifices from Violet and her brother, especially with the fact that Violet has already ‘lost” Brennan to a revolution once. Despite this, the novel ends on a joyful, hopeful note, as the siblings are reunited in Aretia.
