Forged by Malice (Beasts of the Briar, #3)

by Elizabeth Helen

Let’s see if you can be as quick a learner at magic as you are at pleasuring our girl.”

Call me old-fashioned, but bringing a lady to a private arboretum and eating her out like your own personal buffet kind of feels like courting.

There’s a voice in my head screaming at me not to be a lecherous perv, but the lecherous perv part is too strong,

“I could pass a thousand seasons staring at you and never have my fill of your beauty. I want you when the cherry blossoms fall in spring, and during the balmy nights of summer. I want you on a forest floor filled with autumn leaves and shivering in winter’s snow.”

I told her I’d be her darkness, and if only a villain can save her, then so be it.

“Let me take no other but you. If one day, my vow shall prove false and I lie with another, let them serve you in repentance until you tire of them as I did your heart. And if ever there is no love between us, let this bargain melt away like snow under rain.”

“Some secrets are so close to the heart that it feels like we have to rip the entire thing out just to bear them.”

“Wouldn’t it be worth it, though? One woman to save your entire realm?” “It wouldn’t be worth it for me.” Keldarion grips my chin and makes me look at him. “If that brands me as a terrible leader, then so be it. But there is nothing I would not do for you. There is nothing in this world I would not sacrifice for you.”

“I would rip it apart—the cosmos, the threads of life—if I could bind you to us.”

“You’ve always been mine. Mine to chase. Mine to love. Mine to lose.”

“Close me out again, and I’ll chop that perfect cock off with my thorns.”

“I mean for you to use the headboard to push yourself down.” “I’ll suffocate you,” I whisper. He makes a dissatisfied sound. “What need do I have for air with your thighs around my head?”

“For you, Rosalina, I will be better,” he breathes. “For you, I would do anything.”