Dannii Elle’s Reviews > A Dowry of Blood > Status Update

"We will rebuild... We will survive. It's what we're best at."

"She favored careful, quiet planning, like a spider who spun a web for days on end to attract the perfect fly."

"I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way Death burns for human touch: inconsolably, unrelentingly, aching for the annihilation in your kiss"

"Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity."

"Like Christ, I had become intimately acquainted with violence and the sins of the world, but I had not come away unblemished. Only violence felt like holiness to me anymore."

"Now I understood why you were so enamoured with her. She was as cunning as you were, and as cold as a Transylvanian winter. Beneath the fripperies and the giggles there was a girl made of steel, one who would do whatever it took to survive.
You could never resist a survivor. Or a mirror."

"I had never experienced the kind of agony that leaves the mind coiled and poised to lash out at the first opportunity. I would carry that viper inside me for years, letting it out intermittently to rip the wicked to pieces. But that day I had not yet befriended the serpent within. It seemed to me a strange interloper, a frightening thing, demanding to be fed."

"I never dreamed it would end like this, my lord: your blood splashing hot flecks onto my nightgown and pouring in rivulets onto our bedchamber floor. But creatures like us live a long time. There is no horror left in this world that can surprise me. Eventually, even your death becomes its own sort of inevitability."

What a first paragraph!