Forest of Dreams and Whispers (The Fae of the Forest)

by Katherine Macdonald

“My sweet, despicable villain! You’re looking just as hideous as I remember.”

Sometimes Juliana worried about her propensity towards murder to solve even the slightest of inconveniences,

literally me

“Are all women obsessed with murder, or is it just you two?”

all women

She’d probably tell him he knew that already, and threaten some mild violence. He couldn’t wait.

relationship goals

He may not have been born feeling this way, but he was born to feel it—in the way a tree was doomed to know moss and mould and lichen. She’d infected him, diseased him.

He found himself bitterly unprepared for the agony of want. He was used to sordid fantasies and sick desires, used to craving flesh and sex. This… this was something else. He wanted to pull her into the bath with him, to stroke that flame-gold hair from her back and kiss every bruise and muscle and scar while she lay slotted against his chest. He wanted to dance with her all night long, body against his, breath on his face. He wanted to wake in her arms, for her stiff face to smile at him, for those lips to speak softness in his ears. He wanted her body to whisper poetry to his.

Why, her entire life, was it so much easier to hate than love?

“If I could lie, I’d tell you I despise you, that I never think of you, that I have no need of your kindness, that there is nothing I want from you. That you could never make me beg or plead or grovel. I would lie to you until I believed the lies myself.”

“You destroy me, obliterate me, unravel me,” he murmured.

“I don’t know what will happen after I wake you. I know that things cannot be as they were before, that it would not be fair to anyone. But I want you to know that whatever lies I’ve told you, and for however long you live… you were mine, once. And you will forever own a piece of this lying mortal heart of mine.”