A Duel with the Vampire Lord (Married to Magic, #3)

by Elise Kova

The final truth is that the vampires share one mind. The beasts that torment us month to month are little more than living golems that heed their lord’s will.

I might be the forge maiden, but I am no delicate flower. I am as cold as silver. As strong as iron. I will bend for destiny, but not for any man.

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Fear marries desperation to breed poor decisions, Mother always says. We must protect the silver, for it is our only defense against the vampires. A defense that grows more finite by the day.

The tough leather and high collars, the masks, the poison, it is all designed to prevent vampires from performing their darkest and rarest magic. With blood, they can steal the faces of those they drink from and infiltrate the town as our loved ones.

“My power is intoxicating, isn’t it?” he whispers. “Do you want more? Break the curse on my people, dear hunter, and I can keep you drunk on my power until your body can no longer handle me.”

“Fear not, the loathing of wearing the other’s mark is mutual.”

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Power is made, not born,

Many blame all humans for the curse. But I’m capable of hating a circumstance while still pitying the people trapped within it. I know the curse was not your fault and you must see that too.”

There’s a growing need, wrenching, deep within me. Wanting to be set free again. Wanting him to both make and unmake me. Wanting to, for one blessed moment, be my own woman. To be triumphant. To win over death and fear for just once in my life.

Break so it can be rebuilt stronger

with this magic. I want more—to be more.

“You’re lucky you taste so good otherwise I’d be far more frustrated with you.”

“How do we free ourselves from this torment?”

“I don’t know if I want to be free.” His gaze drops farther, to my neck. “You might be torture and temptation incarnate. But you are strength and power. You are damnation and salvation trapped in curves that should be forbidden.”

“And I feel for you.” He pulls me a bit closer, his hands still around mine. “I ache for you. I burn for you. I want you.”

“This scar is from the first time I went to the old castle. This one is from before the long night, when Tempost was a city of desperate people.” “And desperation breeds stupidity,” I echo my mother’s words softly.

“Let them know.” He shrugs. “This world is dark and the night is unyielding; the least we can do is fill it with sweet, forbidden dreams.”

All I’ve ever known is survival. My bodily needs were met while my soul starved.”

“Even the strongest steel can bend…with enough patience, time, and force.”

“If we’ve ‘hardly done anything’ then how have you become my everything?”

“I don’t need magic to see a woman in the process of learning what she wants. I see a woman whose world is so much more than she thought it was, and that threatens her rigid structure. And, as that structure continues to fall away, she’ll have to make more and more of her own choices for the first time in her life about what

she wants

and who she wants...