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Countdown to Burned Release

BURNED TEASER!!! (Aoibheal is pronounced Ah-veel)
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“Show me. Help my druids.”
“God does not step in and adjust minute details on a whim.”...
“You are not God. You are the Unseelie king, once the true queen’s consort. You built an army of monstrosities and took them to war against my people. And destroy is precisely what you do.”
Once, she helped shelter his monstrosities. Believed they deserved the light. That they could be perfected, freed. “For you, my love.”
“I am not your love. I am Aoibheal, Queen of the Fae. Return me to my court. I am needed there.”
“Return you for what? You can do nothing to repair the rift between your world and theirs, the many rifts in them both. Abandon it and abandon your foolish, petty court.” Choose me, he doesn’t say. Not that insignificant world. Not those tiny, inconsequential beings.
“To live with a foolish, petty king?”
She thinks him a fool and petty. He will not acknowledge the arrow shot as a question. She calls him a destroyer. She sees nothing of his glory, recalls no details of the worlds they once made together, so beautiful they often rested on a nearby star for time uncounted to watch them bloom.
“You say you love me,” she says. “Show me. Restore Dublin. Heal their world and mine.”
“Why have you always cared so much about these tiny worlds?”
“Why have you never?”
He had once. When she’d cared about him. He’d made himself small for her and walked in her manner, tending small things. But being small was so much more complicated than being God. “If I do this for you, will you share my bed of your own volition?”
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BURNED
©Karen Marie Moning
November 10, 2014
I do something I never let myself do, and tie her feet down, too, thinking, Man, she should not be letting me do this, followed by, Man, I know better than to do this.
I got her spread-eagled naked, legs wide, totally at my mercy, and I’m not gonna have one fucking ounce of it. She’s not getting out of this bed until she’s had the most explosive orgasm of her life, followed by a few hundred more. I’m keeping her for weeks.
I’m keeping her until she’s telling me I’m the hottest fuck she’s ever had and means it. Until she’s Lor-Pri-ya. Until she sees there’s a little more going on here than Mr. Fucking-Second-Rate-Nice-Guy who’s fun, for fuck’s sake, and wasn’t one of the most vicious killers the old world knew. I can keep it under control. I’ve been soaked in sex for the past week and a half. The lethal edge is off my appetite.
Mostly.
_________________
BURNED
©Karen Marie Moning

I totally fangirl over this series! I'm thinking I need to start a complete series re-read very soon so I can be fresh for Burned!

I did not see that! :(



You will be a miracle worker if you do because I know so many people looked for it afterwards. I was so hyped off of it. Lol.

The king stirred from his reverie and stared down at the unconscious female in his wings.
Half a million years since he’d last seen her. Held her. Touched her.
It was no illusion. She was here. She was real.
She felt as small and gossamer fragile as the new worlds he spun.
He inhaled. She smelled the same as she had on the day he’d met her, of sunshine on bare skin, moonlight on silver oceans and enormous, sky-no-limit dreams. He closed his eyes and opened them.
She was still there.
After an eternity of grief and regret, he held the only thing he’d ever wanted more than he wanted to be God.
A second chance.
He’d imagined this, dreamed it, hungered for it beyond reason.
They are replaceable, one and all, insisted the Fear Dorcha, his dark traveling companion through insanity. You will forget her.
But he never had.
Grief will pass, lisped the Crimson Hag, one of his more exquisitely terrible creations.
But it never did.
He, who had once been whole was halved without hope of ever being complete again. And when you’ve known that kind of love, to exist without it is to live a half-life where nothing else ever feels real.
He’d fabricated their reunion in countless illusions, slipping in and out of madness for millennia, talking to her as if she were beside him, answering. Drawing to his side one mortal woman after the next that possessed the body, the hair, a pale imitation of the passion, never seeing them, calling them by her name, pretending they were her until they died.
He’d lived lie after lie to escape the unbearable truth: She’d left him by choice, killed herself to escape him. He’d come to believe she’d never loved him at all, or worse—had stopped loving him because of the things he’d done.
Gazing down at her now, he found it easy to pardon Cruce for stealing her, forcing her to drink from the Cauldron and erasing all memory of their time together.
Somehow his soulmate was at long last the very thing he’d struggled to make her: Fae, immortal unless killed in one of a very small number of ways. (He intended to eradicate all of those ways immediately.) Funny how things turned should time enough pass. But the king knew the natural state of Universes was not to list toward entropy, rather wholeness. Universes were healthy. It was sentient beings with free will that were the true disasters.
So what if he’d suffered an eternity of hell without her? If someone had offered him this bargain a half a million years ago, said—you need only endure a half a million years without her to have her for all time—he would have taken it in a human heartbeat. What was a brief time of madness for eternity with her?
Fire to his ice. Frost to her flame.
He was whole again.
The Unseelie king bent his head and kissed her. Lightly. Reverently. He’d sliced open his soul and bled it out over memories of the woman he would never kiss again. Deep in his chest, thunder rolled.
Lashes fluttered. She opened her eyes. He drew back and stared down at her, unable to speak. Creator of worlds, God, Devil, whatever he was, words failed him now. His massive black wings shuddered with the depth of his feeling. He shifted and resettled them.
There was wonder in her gaze as she stared up at him: a moment of precious, pre-conscious dawn where all is dew and promise and anything at all might bloom.
Beginnings are fragile things.
Was it as he hoped? Was the power of true love greater than the power of the Cauldron of Forgetting? Did the body recall despite the damage done the mind? Memory, carved into gray matter, never obliterated. What would she say? What would her first words to him be?
Time ground to a halt and, as a human might hold his breath, the Unseelie king held his existence in silence, filling the frozen moment with tiny miracles: the blush of her skin, the curve of her lips, the arch of her brows.
Was that a flicker of confusion? Of duality preceding recognition? He knew her face intimately, had never forsaken a nuance, yet these were expressions he’d had no cause to learn.
After all she’d been through—eternities about which he knew nothing and might have contained any number of atrocities spent as they were at the Seelie Court with Cruce—but more recently kidnapped, interred in a tomb of ice and nearly killed by the power-hungry prince, he sought to reassure her:
“My love, you are safe. I have you now.” He paused, to lend emphasis to his next words, a pledge he would keep until the end of time, which he was fairly certain he was in some fashion or another. “And I will never let you go again.”
Envisioning their joyous future together as immortals, he waited for the first sound of her voice in half a million years…
She screamed.
__________________
BURNED
©Karen Marie Moning

"You could give your wards to Ryodan and let him host this summit. At Chester's."
He slices his head once to the left and I drop it.
I don't ask why. He has his boundaries, I have mine. And boundaries are where you veer off if you value the relationship. You don't grill. You don't probe. Some people think boundaries are a threat. They should be shot. Boundaries cement the foundation of the house people choose to inhabit together. You build it strong or you build a house of cards. I prefer a fortress."
and
"Mac draws up short to keep from slamming into Barrons and her blonde hair swings back over her shoulder, brushing his face as it goes and my hearing is so good I catch the rasp of it chafing the shadow stubble on his jaw, then one of his hands grazes her breast and his eyes narrow when he looks at what he touched in a hungry way I want a man to look at me like one day and, as they continue to recover from the near-collision, their bodies move in a graceful dance of impeccable awareness of precisely where the other is at all times that is unity, symbiosis, partnership I only dream of, wolves that chose to pack up and hunt together, soldiers who will always have each other’s back no matter what, no sin, no transgression too great, ‘cause don’t we all transgress sometimes and it fecking slays me, because once I got a little taste of what that was like and it was heaven and they’re so beautiful standing there, the best of the best, the strongest of the strong that they practically glow to me, on fire with all I ever wanted in my life—a place to belong and someone to belong there with."
and
"You will obey me, Ms. Lane. You will not follow her. That is all."
He turns in a ripple of muscle and beautifully tailored Armani and stalks away, leaving me alone with too many questions, too few choices and a hundred-odd Unseelie.
That is all, my ass. I'm my own woman. I'm Death walking. I'm the possibility for Complete and Total World Destruction. I can sure as hell make my own decisions."

"I frown when another thought occurs to me. Did she set me up for quid pro quo down to the dirty details?
Dark alley nearby--check.
Me--check.
Hungry Unseelie--check.
I get a mental snapshot of me dying just like Alina. It's practically glowing on Mac's pupils.
I want to tell her revenge is a devil you don't want to worship. In destroying your enemy you become it."
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BURNED - On Sale in Hardcover January 20, 2015
© 2014 Karen Marie Moning

"“WHO AM I?” the blonde kneeling between my legs demands.
I need to come so bad I hurt.
I know the answer she wants. She wants me to call her ‘Mistress.’ Like she’s the Dom. She’s already tried to get me to say it twice, sneaking it in like she thinks I won’t notice because of the mind-blowing stuff she’s been doing with her lips and tongue and that flawlessly executed glide of teeth so few women ever master when giving head.
She’s wasting her time. It’s never going to happen. There isn’t a submissive bone in my body. I’m Alpha to the motherfucking core."

My memory is a bit hazy, but I think that Lor is hitting on a blonde and she turns out to be an Unseelie princess and starts ordering him to call her Master/Mistress... something like that! And he is like, over my dead body! But she has too much power over him to resist. He must get enslaved by the princess for a few weeks, then takes his revenge (hence the story above).


I remember it went into more detail about what she was doing to him. I remember that every time he would get close to coming, she would stop and tell him to call her mistress. She kept doing this and finally he relented and called her mistress. Then she showed her true form and told Lor that he was now her slave because he had called her mistress. He was shocked when he realized that she is an unseelie princess because it was thought they didn't exist. It seems like she had lots of really sharp teeth.
I'm wondering if the reason this scene can't be located is because it was cut out from the final draft...

Maybe the person he is tying up now is the unseelie princess.


BURNED TEASER!!!
"I’ve learned a few things about the world, about myself, during my time in Dublin. In the great pasture of life, there are really only four kinds of creatures: sheep as Dani likes to call them; shepherds who try to guide the sheep and keep them on the straight and narrow; sheep dogs who run them from field to field, prevent them from straying, and fight off the predators that come to slaughter and feast; and wolves, savage, fierce and a law unto their own.
I know what I am. A sheepdog. If my food supply ran out and I was stranded on a mountain with the flock, I would starve before I ate one of the sheep. Nature or nurture, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. I protect the flock. To my dying breath.
Two wolves stand in this room, with a complicated past and an uncertain future, their lips a breath apart and I’m not sure if they’ll kiss each other or kill each other. Probably both."
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BURNED
©Karen Marie Moning 2015



WHOAH! I cmpletely forgot about all the siblings I read in KMM's other series. TBH I love Fever and don't care much for the other series :p KMM said Christian was going to be in Fever but she didn't say anything else about the her other characters from her Highlander series. But that would be a nice revenge against Barrons who Christian's pissed at, of course he hates Mac more... And Christian got kidnapped by that evil hag so his twin would worry and want to find him, right? I remember there were twin children but I didn't remember Christian was the one with a twin..

It would be funny if Lor fell in love with a brunette, but I'm hoping she is not the Unseelie Princess. Hoping she is Christian's twin sister.


Whoa, Christian is a twin?! I did not know this! I really need to read the Highlanders series. I saw something KMM said about how we will see more of the Highlanders in the Fever World, so I really need to learn their backstories. But I'm also about to start on a re-read of the Fever books and ICED so I'll be refreshed when Burned comes out. Is anyone else doing a re-read?

Yes because KMM says that Colleen (Christian's twin sister) makes her first appearance in Burned.

That would be great! He would be so furious. Poor thing.




Lor: I think the idea of him with Christian's twin is fun, but I don't really see it happening. From the snippets it sounds like he is really into his mistress. Yeah my vote is he ends up with the unseelie princess. He comes across as so cocky and jerky (to me--I know lots of peeps love Lor!) I think it'd be great to see him brought to his knees. Who knows--they could make a great couple! And yeah I could totally see her having dark hair like the unseelie princes and just wearing the glamour to trap him.
But who will Christian end up with? It needs to be someone who can handle him being an unseelie prince. Someone powerful.

Possessive and intense is how I would describe her future relationship with Ryo based on their previous interactions. Yep. She doesn't let go of what is hers.



I could see Dani going to great lengths to get Dancer (and Christian) back from great trouble. She has that fighting instinct and wants to protect a lot of people. I don't quite know how far she would go for them though.





I question why Ryo wants to keep Jo around. It's not for the cookies either. He can get them from any chick in Chesters and he has before. I think her scholarly abilities to translate ancient languages is a need at this point.
To me, she is already an enemy or villain. She didn't come to Chesters out of the kindness of her heart. She didn't have that sisterly bond with Dani prior to Dani being chained up. So it makes me leery.
Books mentioned in this topic
Burn for Me (other topics)Burned (other topics)
I know I'm not the only one that is beside herself with excitement over the release of this book!
Here are the teasers that KMM has posted on her facebook to amp up our excitement a little more...
Sep 5, 2013
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“Ms. Lane.”
Barrons’ voice is deep, touched with that strange Old World accent and mildly pissed off. Jericho Barrons is often mildly pissed off. I think he crawled from the swamp that way, chafed either by some condition in it, out of it, or maybe just the general mass incompetence he encountered in b...oth places. He’s the most controlled, capable man I’ve ever known.
After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: When I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me this very instant. Then the things he calls me are varied and nobody’s business but mine.
I reply: “Barrons,” without inflection. I’ve learned a few things in our time together. Distance is frequently the only intimacy he’ll tolerate. Suits me. I’ve got my own demons. Besides I don’t believe good relationships come from living inside each other’s pockets. I believe divorce comes from that.
I admire the animal grace with which he enters the room and moves toward me. He prefers dark colors, the better to slide in and out of the night, or a room, unnoticed except for whatever he’s left behind that you may or may not discover for some time, like, say a tattoo on the back of one’s skull.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading,” I say nonchalantly, rubbing the tattoo on the back of my skull. I angle the volume so he can’t see the cover. If he sees what I’m reading, he’ll know I’m looking for something. If he realizes how bad it’s gotten, and what I’m thinking about doing, he’ll try to stop me.
He circles behind me, looks over my shoulder at the thick vellum of the ancient manuscript. “In the first tongue?”
“Is that what it is?” I feign innocence.
He knows precisely which cells in my body are innocent and which are thoroughly corrupted. He’s responsible for most of the corrupted ones. One corner of his mouth ticks up and I see the glint of beast behind his eyes, a feral crimson backlight, bloodstaining the whites.
It turns me on. Barrons makes me feel violently, electrically sexual and alive. I’d march into hell beside him.
But I will not let him march into hell beside me. And there’s no doubt that’s where I’m going.
I thought I was strong, a heroine. I thought I was the victor. The enemy got inside my head and tried to seduce me with lies.
It’s easy to walk away from lies.
Power is another thing.
Temptation isn’t a sin that you triumph over once, completely and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say your prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows exactly how you take it.
He skirts the Chesterfield sofa and stands over me. “Looking for something, Ms. Lane?”
I’m eye level with his belt but that’s not where my gaze gets stuck and suddenly my mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow and I know I’m going to want to. I’m Pri-ya for this man. I hate it. I love it. I can’t escape it.
I reach for his belt buckle. The manuscript slides from my lap, forgotten. Along with everything else but this moment, this man. “I just found it,” I tell him.
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BURNED
©Karen Marie Moning