Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pristine pedigree, refined through ages of selective breeding and the occasional mercy culling.It was life, and death, and all that spanned between.It was his birthright.

You are mine,” he hissed, “and through you, I will reign forever.

He kissed her, and the magic that had been building up steadily around them exploded, raining down in arcs of silver fire that made her half-remember a prophecy from her dreams.One by one, they all will die.Something had been set into motion.

Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.

The villains were always ugly in books and movies. Necessarily so, it seemed. Because if they were attractive—if their looks matched their charm and their cunning—they wouldn't only be dangerous.They would be irresistible.

Some plants were pyrophytic and only germinated when ravaged by fire. Gavin had scorched her with the savagery of his cruel passions until she had been conditioned to bloom in the flames.

She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines.

We're all hunters in my family, you know. Deer, ducks…damsels.

Gavin had thought tragedy suited her: a young Miss Havisham, wearing the moth-eaten tatters of her frayed hopes like a ravaged bride. She had thought at first that it was the chase he craved, or the thrill of conquest, but while both of those might have been true, it was her humiliation that got him off. Physical, psychological, sexual—his favorite games were the ones he played with her head.