Long Live Evil (Time of Iron #1)

by Sarah Rees Brennan

Of course he would call it seduction. Octavian couldn’t understand Key, would never believe he would sacrifice everything because he saw Rae was frightened.

I wish I’d never come to this place. I wish she’d died, and I’d died, and everyone else was safe.”

She couldn’t change her last words to him or his last thoughts. Once someone was dead, the world through their eyes ended. She would always be the villain in Key’s story.

Octavian had let the ghouls loose and killed a dozen women under his protection. And he’d sent assassins on the night of the ball, not to test if she could tell the future, but because he was having a jealous fit about her dance with the Cobra. He was a spoiled, selfish child.

“Don’t give me that look! Stop right now! I cannot believe one of the main characters found out about my well-hidden heart of gold.

The Cobra got upset Marius’s stable was entirely warhorses. He worried over the war steeds having fangs. Apparently Eric expected people to ride to war on vegetarian horses.

“That was a joke,” said Eric. Marius didn’t see what was humorous. He’d thought it was a nice name. The Cobra stared at the expanse of the warhorse’s arched neck, up to the rolling eyes. “So this is my noble steed, Google Maps?”

CRYING

staying,” Horatia announced. “The girls have been training since the Court of Air and Grace, when the king failed to protect us.

Rae remembered a dying villain in a play saying, I mean to do some good in spite of my own nature.

And get Lia spectacles, this falling into everyone’s arms is ridiculous.

The Emperor, who Rae had always loved and never been able to see in Octavian. The evidence had been staring her in the face all this time. Octavian, who discarded one sister for another, was not loyal past death. Octavian frequently removed his gauntlets, and Rae knew the Emperor hated taking them off. King Octavian and the Emperor weren’t the same person. They never had been, not in any version of the story. The Emperor was always Key.

WHAT. A. SPECTACULAR.TWIST.

The Emperor’s eyes had once been the grey of ashes, but the ash had woken to burning new life. Fire and smoke rose in the dark red imperial gaze.