Throne of Ice and Blood (Flame and Thorns, #2)

by Marion Blackwood

“Because if I have to see you in this collar one fucking second more than absolutely necessary, I’m going to start killing people.”

“You’re right,” he says, tilting his head back so that he meets my gaze. “I kneel for nothing and no one.” His golden eyes burn like flames, searing right through my soul. “But for you… For you, I would kneel.”

I need to pretend as if I am in front of everyone. Otherwise, the Icehearts will begin torturing me themselves. I’m helping the humans plan their heist and I’m also trying to start a full-scale rebellion on my own. If anyone finds that out, I’m dead. One mistake, in anything I do, and I’m doomed. Sometimes, the pressure of all of that is so intense that I can barely breathe. But when I’m with Draven, that life and death threat is somehow gone. And I feel like I can breathe again.

“How did you know that I was in danger?” I shout at him again. “How did you know where I was?” “Because you’re my mate!”

“Don’t ever apologize for crying. It’s not a weakness. It’s a sign that you’ve had to be strong for too long.”

as much as I hate Bane and Jessina with all my heart and soul, I do understand how they have managed to keep this system running for so long. They set it up perfectly. They isolated us completely. Not only did they physically trap us in a city that we can’t leave, they also controlled the entire flow of information. They killed all the adults and burned all the history books. And then they taught us what they wanted us to know. They controlled our birthrates so that our population wouldn’t outgrow the city, and so that our magical bloodlines would be stronger and provide more magic for them to drain. And they taught us that only having one child was how our biology worked so that we wouldn’t riot. All the doctors are dragon shifters, so there was no way for us to know. And all the teachers were shifters too. Those teachers taught us about our history and our culture and race in the way that they wanted us to learn it. Taught us that we are inherently evil. That we are backstabbing deceivers who broke a peace treaty and enslaved all the dragon shifters. That we need to spend the rest of our life atoning for that. And because we had no one else to ask about our history, what they told us became the truth. They kept us weak and distracted by not allowing us enough food. And drunk and distracted by allowing us as much alcohol as we wanted. Who is going to worry about whether our schoolteachers are lying to us when our stomachs are constantly aching with hunger and our minds ar...

If you want to control people, isolating them is really the smartest move you can make. As long as you control their food supply, their healthcare, their education, and, most of all, their access to information and the outside world, it will be almost impossible for them to fight back.