The North Wind (The Four Winds, #1)

by Alexandria Warwick

It’s your blood I need, not your death.

I am not gentle. I am a creature whose teeth were sharpened on suffering, and above all else, I will survive.

“If you knew what it felt like to love someone with your entire being, you’d know I never had a choice.”

The Frost King is no husband of mine. I am an obligation. He is an inconvenience.

“If you hadn’t drunk so much wine, you would not be in this predicament,”

“If the Frost King hadn’t forced me to marry him, I wouldn’t have drunk so much wine.”

I suppose a part of me yearns for kindness, even in the form of empty words.

What can power give? It cannot care for one who has taken ill. It cannot make one laugh. It is a rigid, cold thing, affectionless and barren.

“If anyone is sleeping on the floor, it’s you. You’re young. I’m many millennia old. I have back pain.”

The pale smoothness is interrupted by ropes of heavy scarring, welts that drip and smear down his spine like hot candlewax. It is old, tough skin.

“Perhaps if you didn’t act like I had an incurable disease, you would not be so uncomfortable.”