Destroy Me

Destroy Me is a novella by the American writer Tahereh Mafi, first published in 2012 as an electronic book and reissued in print later. It belongs to the series that began with Shatter Me.

The story is told from the point of view of Warner, the young commander from the first novel, in the days after Juliette shoots him and escapes. He is recovering from a wound that should have killed him, keeping a sector under control while rumours of a rebellion spread, and dealing with his father, the Supreme Commander of the Reestablishment, whose plans for the war are not his son's plans. Warner's orders are to recover Juliette and engineer the deaths of Adam and Kenji, the two people who helped her, and the novella is mostly about the gap between what he is ordered to do and what he wants. Mafi wrote it to show the antagonist's own account of the events of the first book, and it sits between Shatter Me and Unravel Me in the sequence.

The series is a dystopian romance in which the two central characters are on opposite sides of a regime, and this short book gives the antagonist a voice before the main story continues.