“Ash sighed after he left, feeling somehow even more exhausted than she had when she'd crawled into bed the night before. She climbed back under the covers and closed her eyes. Just in time for more knocking on the door. "I hate everybody," Ash mumbled into her pillow...”

“She just laughed in his face and told him she'd sooner crawl in a bed with his father's leeches before she'd crawl in one with him. She stopped laughing when he put his knife in her.”

“She knew she'd wounded him when he'd least expected it, and her satisfaction lasted until the door had closed behind him. Once he was gone, it ebbed away along with her anger, leaving her with naught but the ashes and embers of a dying hearth fire.”

“The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.”

“there was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before.”

“She not no fool, Lilith tell herself. She not a sleeping princess and Robert Quinn is not no king or prince. He just a man with broad shoulders and black hair who call her lovey and she like that more than her own name. She don’t want the man to deliver her, she just want to climb in the bed and feel he wrap himself around her.”