“The powerful fey close to me still hate me and don’t want me on the throne. If they could have, they would have killed me long ago. They try to control me and keep me tightly bound to my duty. I have to fight every day to rise above it all. Darkness and cruelty, I can hardly bear each second of it and yet I have to. I guess I’ve closed myself off from the world since then, since you.”

“I glared at Shane, who gave me an innocent look. With the most serious expression I could make, I joked, “Some of my close friends have called me Black Widow, because after I sleep with someone, I kill them.” Shane looked at me evenly, matching my serious expression, “I have no doubt in my mind that you have had that effect on men, since I feel like I’ve died every time you’ve smiled at me.”

“The life I walk binds my hands it makes me take things that I don’t understand I walk this dark world unknowing of what they hold true, forgetting the me I once knew, until you. The life I walk eternally was all I knew nothing more held me here to this earth until you. I feel the pain of every heart I take I feel the desire to replace all that I have grown to hate Darkness holds me close but the light still draws my empty soul The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.”

“This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.”

“How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!”

“I guess I keep waiting for someone to choose me, to want me, over all the other women he could have.”