The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air, #2)

by Holly Black

“For a moment,” he says, “I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me.” I make a face at him. “And what made you decide it wasn’t?” He grins up at me. “They missed.”

“Kiss me again,” he says, drunk and foolish. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”

that I like him better than I’ve ever liked anyone and that of all the things he’s ever done to me, making me like him so much is by far the worst.

Kill him, a part of me says, a part I remember from the night I took him captive. Kill him before he makes you love him.

The offhand implication that he’s not alone most nights bothers me, and I hate that it does.

But as I look toward her, evaluating how swiftly I can do that, my gaze catches on her earrings. Dangling from her lobes are a moon and a star. The same ones I bargained for from Grimsen. The ones I lost in the wood. She wasn’t wearing them when we got in the carriage, so she must have got them … Beside her, Locke is smiling his fox smile, and when he walks, he has a slight limp.

It takes me a moment to put the image together, to realize the Ghost is not restrained nor even menaced. To realize this is a betrayal.

“Marry me,” he says. “Become the Queen of Elfhame.”