Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark.

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

She shattered through her horror as if it were a mirror and her sanity were the glinting fragments of broken glass.

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

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.

That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast.

If I catch you, I might do anything. I might strip the skin from your bones as I drain you dry. Or I might drag you into my chambers and have you pleasure me in ways you cannot even imagine. I might even take mercy on you, and that would be the cruelest injustice of all, because for you, it would only be a temporary reprieve.

You are fifty different kinds of twisted.""Only fifty? Val, you wound me.

Don't tell me it's going to fucking be okay! I am not okay with being that fucker's pinata!