Acidentally Snooping On Bf! Katsuki's Phone And Seeing Something... Kinky.

and that’s exactly why he called her ass a liar lmfao

jude "climbed into the rafters of the throne room while grievously injured because she thought someone was going to try to assassinate cardan" duarte telling him she wouldn't take a knife for him is so funny. like ok girl

i used to be too shy to interact w fanfic authors, but after i finally started to do so, that i realised they're the same @ me

Another Cinderella Story (2008) dir. Damon Santostefano

“is this okay?” 

when eijirou looks up from his phone, you gesture to the outfit you’d just put on for mina’s party. 

“y-yeah,” he coughs, clearing his throat. the flush in his cheeks deepens. “you look incredible.” 

“and you’re okay?” you ask. “if i wear this out, i mean.” 

eijirou’s brows pull together as he blinks at you, seemingly trying to figure out if he heard you right. he sounds a little offended when he says, “babe. you’re not seriously asking me that.” 

when you don’t immediately respond, he crosses his arms. starts soapboxing a little about how it’s his responsibility, as a man, to challenge toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. and telling his girlfriend what to wear is being part of the problem, not the solution. 

then, he scrubs the back of his neck with a big hand, somehow managing to look both sheepish and cocky when he adds, as an afterthought, “..... and i can fight.”

BY THE BOOK : MIDORIYA IZUKU X READER

SUMMARY: When your pro hero boyfriend comes home to find you studying, he suddenly takes a great interest in helping out. You find his methods... questionable. TAGS/WARNINGS: nsft, hysterical literature (reading out loud while sexually stimulated), pro hero deku, deku still has ofa, support tech grad student reader, slight intelligence kink, gn + afab reader, cunnilingus, established relationship, aged up characters, fluff (3k) NOTES: Hi guys! I have been in survival mode as of late and the writing has been slow going; my sincerest apologies for how long it’s taking me to burn down my @ficsforgaza backlog. But I finally had the time & energy on my hands this weekend to work on this one and I had such a blast!! I hope I’m not too rusty—and if I am, I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved writing it regardless lol. Love you and thank you always for your patience. Happy Holidays!!

Sometimes, you thought you could tell your boyfriend was near, even before you heard his key in the lock.

It was something to do with his power, you’d always suspected—as a support engineer unduly interested in other people’s capabilities, you’d spent hundreds of hours turning it over in your head. It was the unnatural immensity of other people’s powers, you thought, pulling and coiling just beneath the surface of Izuku’s skin. In close proximity, after prolonged use, its presence felt like a shiver up the back of your neck.

You felt the barest hint of it now, an unsettled feeling creeping into the marrow of your bones, and you sat up on the couch just as you heard the scratch of Izuku’s keys at the door.

One For All fit cleanly into Izuku’s own unwavering intensity somehow, like the last piece of his puzzle. Though one would certainly never think so looking at him as he spilled through the door, pink-cheeked from the cold, all bright eyes, sweetly angelic features, and a riot of wild green curls. He looked windswept from the biting winter breeze. He also looked too kind to be carrying the sort of power he did—too sweet and eager and lovely.

“Look what the wind blew in,” you grinned at him over the back of the couch, after assessing he was well. Your eyes tracked the sinuous movement of those broad shoulders as he yanked his mouthguard over his head, the flex and pull of his bicep as he hung it beside the door. He was moving without pause, no sign of injury or muscle strain , and his suit was intact. Ordinarily you didn’t mind if there was a bit of shredding about the abs as long as he came back to you whole and hale, but in the winter you didn’t like him wandering about risking the chance of frostbite.

Your heart fluttered when Izuku returned your smile with one of his own, so beautiful and bright, chasing away the cold he’d tracked in like a warm sliver of sun.

“Lots of small, easy fights today?” You guessed, judging from his intact suit but clear whiff of power about him.

Izuku scrubbed a hand through that riot of curls, exposing the reddened shell of a cold ear. “I only had to use blackwhip a couple of times,” he said as he shouldered the door closed behind him, the muscle of his thighs flexing enticingly as he stepped out of his boots.

You gestured at the pot of soup you’d left warming on the stove, and the veritable pile of crusty bread beside it. Warmth and carbs, exactly what you would have wanted if you were a pro hero fresh off a long day of patrolling in the snow.

Izuku’s eyes fixed on it with an obliging amount of interest, and he almost tripped over himself in the genkan in his haste to get to the kitchen. “I love you,” you heard him say, muffled through a mouthful of bread, heard the clatter of the silverware drawer and a bowl being placed on the counter.

You smiled and turned back to the book in your lap, a particularly dry, knotty text on robotic imitation learning that had had your eyes drifting closed for the better part of an hour. It was the last you’d need to get through for your Wearable Technologies graduate course, and something you were deeply interested in incorporating into your design practice. You could train a piece of equipment on how an individual pro hero moved and deployed their quirk, and use predictive modeling to deploy assistance functionalities within milliseconds if you got it right—such as immediate cooling in pro hero Shouto’s temperature vest the moment he ignited an arm.

The implementation was going to be so cool—but the theory was so mind numbing.

You felt the couch sink in beside your feet, and Izuku peered interestedly at the title in your lap.

“Introduction to Robotic Imitation Learning,” he echoed, and you could hear the note of excitement in his voice. You suppressed a fond smile, knowing he was already thinking through the same applications you had—he was just as much of a nerd as you were.

“Introduction to Snoozing and Napping,” you grumbled, turning back to your page. “There are only so many words on the Kalman filter framework a brain can handle before the human mind shuts itself down.”

Izuku hummed in interest around a spoonful of soup, propping himself up against your leg. The exterior of his suit was still cool from the outside, and he groaned with relief from the warmth of your skin, even as you hissed at the chill.

You knew he wanted you to go on, so you generalized for him. “It’s an algorithm used for robotic motion planning—you not only take measurements of the thing you want to model but you account for uncertainties to predict the probability that something is going to happen.”

Izuku nodded, taking another spoonful of soup, gesturing for you to go on.

You summoned up the willpower to explain joint probability distribution, pleased when Izuku easily managed to follow—he’d always been a quick study, especially of anything that could be employed in the service of heroics. You’d long thought if he hadn’t been gifted his quirk, he would be an insane support engineer.

He managed to finish his entire bowl of soup in the time it took you to explain, and housed another two slices of buttered bread with the sort of alacrity you’d only ever seen in pro heroes and professional athletes, making you smile while you spoke.

His spoon clinked softly against the edge of the bowl as he set them aside on the coffee table, and he hooked his chin over your knees as you finished explaining. In the setting sun from your windows he looked especially lovely, the kind, angular planes of his face brushed in gold, softening the spots of his freckles.

His eyes were especially bright, the way they always were when something in particular had caught his interest, and he smiled at you again over the tops of your knee caps.

“I admire how smart you are,” he told you, in the simple, straightforward way he always gave out compliments. It was like a shot to the heart every time, and you could feel your face warm with the praise even after years of receiving similar compliments.

You reflexively flapped a dismissive hand. “Not smart enough to have internalized it all! I have mostly been falling asleep to it,” you promised him.

He tilted his head, a green curl falling into his eyes. “I know you won’t have a problem when you’re awake.”

You shifted your legs with embarrassment, and a long fingered hand came up to cup the front of your thigh, as Izuku turned more fully towards you. You could feel the warm, hard planes of his chest against your shins, the line of his jumpsuit’s zipper pressing insistently just below your knee.

“Gotta try to impress you somehow,” you joked, your skin prickling as Izuku’s fingers absent-mindedly drew a pattern across your thigh. You could feel the heat of his hand through the thin material of the leggings you’d lounged around in all day, the chill finally chased away from his skin now that he’d come inside and warmed up.

“You do impress me,” he said in his soft, gentle tone. Which made your cheeks and nose burn hotter.

You knew you did, and the steady faith Izuku had in the people around him was one of your favorite things about him. It still made you feel like a middle schooler with a crush to think about, though, the intensity of your feelings too much for one body to handle.

“I will study hard to live up to your faith in me,” you promised, unable to help the goofy smile you knew you were giving him.

Izuku’s chin shifted against the tops of your knees, and he pressed his mouth to the knob of your left one, leaving a smiling kiss. “Tell me more?” he asked, fingers still sliding softly over your thigh.

“I’ll read it to you as I go, then,” you said, turning back to the brick of a tome, propping it up more firmly on your stomach as you adjusted yourself against the couch arm. Izuku’s eyes watched you over the top of the pages, that emerald gaze tracking your face closely.

“‘The algorithm works via a two-phase process: a prediction phase and an update phase’,” you began, trying to turn your attention away from Izuku and back to the text. “‘In the prediction phase, the Kalman filter produces estimates of the current state variables, including their uncertainties. Once the outcome of the next measurement (necessarily corrupted with some error, including random noise) is observed, these estimates are updated using a weighted average, with more weight given to estimates with greater certainty.’”

Izuku’s long fingers traced firmer lines across your thighs, almost like he was taking notes. He layered another kiss along the line of your knee, eyes glittering at you as you read.

“‘The algorithm is recursive,’” you continued, “‘It can operate in real time, using only the present input measurements and the state calculated previously and its uncertainty matrix; no additional past information is required.’”

You almost jumped as Izuku’s mouth trailed lower, into the space between your knees, leaving kisses along your inner thigh. His fingers gently pulled one thigh away to make space for him in between, and you cleared your throat, trying to return to the text at hand.

“‘Optimality of Kalman filtering assumes that errors have a normal–that is, Gaussian–distribution,’” you read on. “‘The following assumptions are made about random processes: Physical random phenomena may be thought of as due to primary random sources exciting dynamic systems. The primary sources are assumed to be independent gaussian random processes with zero mean; the dynamic systems will be linear.’”

Izuku let out a soft breath, insinuating himself further between your thighs. Your own breath came out a little uneven as he bent over you, mouth tracking dangerously towards the inseam of your leggings.

You paused, but Izuku fixed you with a look of his slightly-darkened eyes. “Please—keep reading,” he said, his tone a little lower than it had been a minute ago.

You swallowed in shocked understanding, skin tingling. You felt yourself nod, as Izuku’s fingers strayed to the waist of your pants, dipping below the band.

You let him slowly peel your leggings down, your underwear with them, adjusting as needed to make it easy for him, even as you tried to return your attention to your textbook.

“‘Regardless of Gaussianity, however, if the process and measurement covariances are known, then the Kalman filter is the best possible linear estimator in the minimum mean-square-error sense,’” you quoted, nearly squeaking when Izuku pressed his mouth to your hip, his curls tickling the skin of your belly. His hands gripped either side of your thighs, palms square and rough against your skin, and you tried not to shiver with the feeling.

“Um—‘Although there may be better nonlinear estimators’,” you said, then nearly jumped out of your skin when Izuku pressed his mouth to the core of you, only the strength of his grip stopping you from accidentally kicking him in surprise.

“Oh my g—uh! It—um—‘It is a common misconception perpetuated in the literature that the Kalman filter cannot be rigorously applied unless all noise processes are assumed to be Gaussian,’” you managed, before your cut off into a groan as Izuku layered a hot, sweet kiss over you, tongue dipping carefully between your folds. “Ah-–Izuku—”

Izuku petted a thumb gently over the top of your thigh to show he was listening, even as he swiped his tongue over you again, a long, firm stroke that had your thighs flexing in his hold. He laved over your clit, sucking ever so slightly, and your grip almost tore the edge of your textbooks as it tightened.

“Keep going,” he urged briefly, then did it again, punching a groan out of you.

“Extensions—oh—‘Extensions and generalizations of the method have also been developed, such as the extended Kalman filter and the unscented Kalman filter which work on nonlinear systems,’” you read on, voice shooting up nearly into a squeal when two of Izuku’s long, firm fingers pressed into you, as his mouth moved over you again.

“Ah! Oh my god—the—um, the basis—-” you said, breath growing short. Izuku’s fingers unerringly found the spot inside you that made you twist in his grip with the ease of long practice, and his jaw worked as he kissed you so shockingly filthily. You could feel something already starting to build up behind your navel, a fluttery lightness, an insatiable insistence on more.

“‘The basis a hidden Markov model—oh, fuck—such that the state space of the latent variables is continuous and all latent and observed variables have–ah!--Gaussian distributions,’’’ you recited, your voice tripping up further into a register that sounded more like begging than reading.

Izuku’s fingers worked you, long and thick and perfect inside you, as his tongue drew unrelenting circles around your clit. Stars seemed to spark in your vision, and your eyes squeezed shut, losing your place on the page as your hips flexed into his face. You felt suddenly very floaty and lightheaded, and not at all in a position to keep going.

Still, you tried to refocus your attention.

“‘K–Kalman filtering has been used successfully in—oh—multi-sensor fusion—ah, ah!--and distributed sensor networks–fuck, please, Izuku—to develop distributed or consensus Kalman f-filtering,’” you said, your tone nearly a cry.

Izuku groaned softly, sucking gently as his fingers curled inside you. It made your veins spark under your skin, your legs shaking in Izuku’s hands. You abandoned your grip on your book to seize the arm of the couch, clawing desperately at the fabric.

“Please, Izuku,” you cried, hips bucking towards his mouth.

The book tumbled off your stomach but you hardly noticed, gaze refocusing on the way his eyelashes fluttered as he licked you. His fingers played gently within you, a maddening press that was simultaneously too much and not enough, and his other hand came up to slide under your sweater, plucking gently at your nipple.

You lost yourself to the feeling—caught between the mind-melting curl of his fingers, the delicate suction of his mouth, and the careful pinch of your nipple. A delicious heat curled through you, waves of unbearable pleasure, and you could hear yourself babbling nonsense—garbled syllables of Izuku’s name, and every entreaty you could think of, a hundred thousands mores and oh pleases.

Izuku abandoned your nipple to pull you more firmly against him with a strong arm curled under your thigh, pressing you even harder into his mouth.

You muffled a scream in the sleeve of your sweater as he sucked you harder, tongue laving over you in loving strokes. Only his terrible strength held you down as you writhed beneath him, and then his fingers twisted in a way that had your vision whiting out—and you were suddenly thrown out over the edge of your pleasure.

Izuku licked you through it as you squirmed and begged and cried out his name, your climax seeming to last for eons.

You were panting hard when you finally slumped into the cushions of your couch, the ceiling seeming to swim in and out of focus before your eyes. When you gained enough control of your body again you looked down at Izuku, finding him watching you with a satisfied, almost shy curl to his mouth.

“You’re beautiful,” he told you, emerald gaze glittering with sincerity. “You’re so smart.”

Impossibly you felt your heart swell with even more love for him, and you seized his shoulder, dragging him up over you so you could kiss his mouth. The taste of yourself on him was embarrassing yet thrilling, and you petted a pleased hand through Izuku’s wild mess of curls as you kissed him.

“Well you are amazing,” you told him, swiping a thumb over his cheek fondly, smoothing over his freckles. A gorgeous watercolor of pink washed over his cheeks and nose at the proclamation, and you could hear his fingers flex in the cushion beside your head.

The sight of him flushed and waiting over you like another small something inside of you, like a pilot light, and you let your mouth pull into a wry grin.

“I hope you know I learned nothing though,” you said casually, your plan for your next steps already forming in your head. You let a hand trail carefully down Izuku’s flank, tracking towards his waist. “I think maybe I might need a few rounds for it to really sink in.”

Izuku’s ears went red against the green of his hair, and you felt your smile widen. “Maybe you could read it to me this time?” you asked, guiding him to roll under you, retrieving your book from the floor as you did so.

You settled yourself on the tops of Izuku’s thighs, feeling the hard press of him against your core, as you placed your textbook into his waiting hands.

Izuku’s answering smile was all the permission you needed. You directed him to start from the beginning of the chapter, and he did so in that soft, lilting tone of his you so loved. And then your fingers trailed up to the zipper at his collar.

It was time to return the favor—wholeheartedly.

REFERENCES: Kalman Filtering (Wikipedia) I took the passages our Reader recited from here because I do not actually understand Kalman filtering at all and could not organically come up with feasible text for her to read through. Sorry in advance to the author of this page lol.

barbie as the princess and the pea 🫛🩷

my favorite the folk of the air quotes

(who said it + pages)

the cruel prince:

"I do not yearn to be their equal. In my heart, I yearn to best them" jude duarte, 31.

"But I am done with being weak. I am done with being good. I think I am going to be something else." jude duarte, 43.

"Because you're like a story that hasn't happened yet" locke, 101

"Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear" jude duarte, 197

"If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse." jude duarte, 210

"But we all want stupid things. That doesn't mean we should have them" jude duarte, 219

"If you hurt me, I wouldn't cry. I would hurt you back." jude duarte, 231

"I hate how I feel around him, the irrational panic when I touch his skin" jude duarte, 262

"Prince Cardan is my prisoner" jude duarte, 267

"There are so many broken things that I don't know how to fix. But I know how to fight" jude duarte, 276

"Children can laugh all day and still cry themselves to sleep at night." jude duarte, 286

"I forgot how charming he can be — and how dangerous that is" jude duarte, 298

"Most of all, I hate you because I think of you. Often. It's disgusting, and I can't stop" cardan, 307

"You really do want me. And you hate it" jude duarte, 307

"I can be charming. I charmed you, didn't I?" "Do not expect others to share my depraved tastes"

the wicked king:

"She liked it when she was angry, too. Angry was better than scared" epilogue

"Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to" Madoc, 6

"It amuses her to keep me out of trouble" cardan, 14

"I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear. Your hearts beats fast. Your senses are heightened. You grow light-headed, maybe even dizzy" Balekin, 25

"Your infernal majesty" jude duarte, 46

"The disturbing thing about Cardan is how well he plays the fool to disguise his own cleverness" jude duarte, 49

"For a moment, I wondered if it wasn't you shooting bolts at me." "And what made you decide it wasn't?" "They missed." 57

"Kiss me again. Kiss me until I'm sick of it." cardan, 57

"He hates you. Even if he wants you, he hates you. Maybe he hates you the more for it" jude duarte, 57

"If you're the sickness, I suppose you can't also be the cure" cardan, 57

"You're never to deny me an audience or give an order to keep me from your side." "Whysoever would I want you to leave my side?" jude & cardan, 59

"You want to know what I did to make him raise me up? I kissed him on the mouth, and then I threatened to kiss him some more if he didn't do exactly what I wanted." jude duarte, 81

"You ought not to be here tonight, little ant" cardan, 98

"I have too often been troubled by dreams of Jude. Her face features prominently in my most frequent nightmares." cardan, 103

"I hate you." He tilts my face to his. "Say it again." jude & cardan, 104

"Whatever you do to me, I can do worse to you" jude duarte, 107

"I stare at his treacherous mouth and imagine it on me" jude duarte, 107

"Tell me that you hate me." "I hate you" jude & cardan, 144

"I hate you so much that sometimes I can't think of anything else." jude, 145

"I want to tell you so many lies." cardan, 145

"I like him better than I've ever liked anyone." jude duarte, 146

"So much of winning is waiting" jude duarte, 147

"I can't help recalling him gazing up from my bed, intoxicated and disturbingly intoxicating" jude duarte, 157

"I wonder if I will ever be able to look at him again without remembering what it was like to touch him." jude duarte, 180

"It seems I have a singular taste for women who threaten me." cardan, 180

"It occurs to me that maybe desire isn't something overindulging helps. Maybe it is not unlike mithridatism; maybe I took a killing dose when I should have been poisoning myself slowly, one kiss at a time." jude duarte, 181

"I hope Cardan misses me." jude duarte, 225

"Fear is terrible, but the combination of hope and fear is worse" jude duarte, 244

"I never thought he liked me enough to save me" jude duarte, 253

"I wasn't kind, Jude. Not to many people. Not to you. I wasn't sure if I wanted you or if I wanted you gone from my sight so that I would stop feeling as I did, which made me even more unkind. But when you were gone —truly gone beneath the waves— I hated myself as I never have before." cardan, 266

"Sometimes lying is a real pleasure." jude duarte, 277

"Yes, my sweet villain, my darling god." cardan, 284

"Sweet Jude. You're my dearest punishment." cardan, 285

"You say I will be well because you fear I won't be." cardan, 288

"Glad you're up to mocking" "I hope it's the last thing about me to go." jude & cardan, 289

"Marry me. Become the queen of Elfhame." cardan, 304

"Maybe I wouldn't have to be afraid to love him." jude duarte, 306

"I will lie down. If you lie with me." cardan, 308

"I have become the Queen of Faerie" jude duarte, 308

"Revenge is sweet, but ice cream is sweeter" vivi, 321

the queen of nothing:

"All power is cursed." jude duarte, 10

"Love is stupid. All we do is break one another's hearts" Heather, 31

"Didn't you get my letters?" cardan, 68

"Maybe I believe that it's time for Elfhame to be ruled by a queen." jude duarte, 128

"She is my wife. The rightful High Queen of Elfhame. And most definitely not in exile." cardan, 147

"It was terrifying, watching you fall. I mean, you're generally terrifying, but I am unused to fearing for you." cardan, 159

"You never break." cardan, 159

"He was a symbol of everything about Elfhame that I couldn't have, everything that would never want me." jude duarte, 161

"I want you here by my side, as my queen" cardan, 163

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe he'd like to hear me scream."  "I would. And perhaps one day I will." jude & cardan, 166

"I never thought love was a game" cardan, 185

"He's so beautiful, so perfectly, horribly, inhumanely beautiful that I can't barely breathe" jude duarte, 201

"By you, I am forever undone." cardan, 203

"We have lived in our armor for so long, you and I. And now I am not sure if either of us knows how to remove it." cardan, 203

"I missed you. In the mortal world, when I thought you were my enemy, I still missed you." jude duarte, 204

"My sweet nemesis, how glad I am that you returned." cardan, 204

"It’s you I love,” he says. “I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn’t have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours." cardan, 209

"I do love you. I will always love you." jude duarte, 278

"Every part of me is a delight." cardan, 282

"I love you." jude duarte, 291

"If I let myself love you, I would burn up like a match. Like the whole matchbook" jude duarte, 291

"And you do love me." "I love you." "Because I am clever and funny. You didn't mention my handsomeness." "Or your deliciousness. Although those are both good qualities" cardan & jude, 291

"I knew little else, but I always knew you." cardan, 292

how the king of elfhame learned to hate stories:

"Not a heart of stone, but a heart of fire." 31

"The odd curve of her ear was what he had noticed first." 55

"Jude, Cardan thought, hating even the shape of her name. Jude." 57

"Playing the villain was the only thing he'd ever really excelled at." 73

"There was absolutely no reason to think of Jude in that moment. she was utterly insignificant." 74

"Boys change. And so do stories." 79

"A heart of stone can still be broken." 86

"Stop telling me who I am. I am tired of your stories." 99

"I am nothing, if not dramatic." 111

"He had always been awful. Now he was just worse." 118

"And all through that night and for many nights after, he couldn't rid his thoughts of her. Not the hatred in her eyes. That he understood. That he didn't mind. It warmed him." 124

"But every night, Jude haunted him. The coils of her hair. The calluses on her fingers. An absent bite of her lip. It was too much, the way he thought about her. He knew it was too much, but he couldn't stop. It disgusted him that he couldn't stop." 124

"Remember, all you really get to control is yourself." 12

"Cardan cannot mind when he takes Jude in his arms." 132

"Why didn't you hate everyone? Everyone, all the time." "I hated you." 133

"Because stories tell a truth, if not precisely the truth." 159

"You don't think monster girls and wicked boys deserve love?" 162

"Having a heart is terrible, but you need one anyway." 165

"No one's heart has to remain stone." 166

"Surely you've heard of her, Jude Duarte." 166

"Truly, I don't know what I would do without her." 166

"You didn't hear the story I told. A shame. It featured a handsome boy with a heart of stone and a natural aptitude for villainy. Everything you could like."  "You are really terrible, you know that? I don't even understand why the things you say makes me smile." 172

"The next time you want to make a point, I beg you not to make it so dramatically.  "So long as you're begging." 173

the stolen heir:

"If I look at him too long, I want to take a bite out of him." 28

"I wonder which sister he'd glamoured. I hoped not the one who sat on the throne now, his life in her hands." 46

"The sword's name is Nightfell," he whispered. "It belongs to Jude." 49

"Some people are ridiculous. Especially when it comes to love." 69

"Let me do that," he says, taking strands of my hair in his fingers. "it's the color of primroses." 102

"Since you're in a benevolent mood, perhaps you'll also dance with me." 117

"Kissing him is profane. It gives all the horrible satisfaction of smashing a crystal goblet." 120

"Hit me again," the prince says, daring them. 146

"It's me. Now go away." "But I've only just found you. And I want to talk." "What will you give me if I do, Prince of Elfhame?" "The pleasure of my company?" 152

"Let me stay in the woods with you." 153

"I thought you didn't like me." "I can prentend, for one night." 155

"He'd acted the fool, that his enemies might believe he was one." 168

"It pleases me to see a Greenbriar with some teeth." I assume that the last is a dig at the High king, well known for leaving the fighting to his wife. 169

"It would be safer if I hated him. Since I cannot, perhaps it is a good thing that he now hates me" 171

"Maybe I'm glad that you gave me the opportunity to be my worst self." 173

"I suppose you want to believe I charmed you into kissing me?" 191

"He'll steal your heart." 198

"Do you know what I admire about you? That you never stopped being angry. It can be brave to hate. Sometimes it's like hope." 216

"It is my curse to adore cruel women." 235

"When his eyes meet mine, desire, as keen as any blade, bends the air between us. The moment slows. I want to bite his lip. To feel the heat of his skin. To slide my hands beneath his armor and trace the map of his scars." 247

"I am poison. Poison in my blood. I poison everything I touch." 279

"Pretend with me," he whispers. And then he presses his mouth to mine. 291

"My greatest weakness has always been my desire for love. It is a yawning chasm within me, and the more that I reach for it, the more easily I am tricked. I am a walking bruise, an open sore." 333

"Fear is not love, but it can appear much the same. So too, power." 349

"But I can't pretend that I don't like the sound of him screaming my name." 352