Kingdom of the Feared (Kingdom of the Wicked, #3)

by Kerri Maniscalco

“If anyone chains you again, I will become every nightmare mortals have ever had of me and then some.”

“Simply saying ‘I love you; I’m pleased you’re all right’ would have sufficed, too.”

I loved when he looked at me like that. Like I was the beginning and end of each of his fantasies. He certainly was mine.

“We’re blood.” “And he is her fate. As she is his. ‘As above, so below.’ They are the balance. Light and dark. One fallen from above, and one created in the underworld below.”

“Rise,” he said softly. “Just as they always feared you would.” His words, the very same he’d spoken to me weeks ago while I’d visited his House of Sin, drew my attention to his face. He wasn’t looking at me like I was pathetic. He looked like someone who understood, intimately, what it was like to lose everything. To be forced to stand when you wished to fall. To get up on your own and defy the hand of fate that brought so much pain by smacking you down time and again. To choose to live and flourish despite the bad. And most important, to dare to dream of better days while your current world was a living nightmare.

“I always knew you. And always will. Your soul calls to mine. It’s a feeling of coming home. Of peace. No magic can duplicate it.”

Magic does not make you powerful. Your courage. Your heart. Your mind. Your very soul makes you a force to be reckoned with.