Melanie Holzer’s Reviews > The Wolf and the Crown of Blood > Status Update

‘it means every cell in your body was crafted to complement mine. we’re two pieces of the same whole.’

‘i’ll never be able to fly with you, wolf.’
‘then fall with me.’

i wonder if this is what lunacy feels like. wanting something so desperately even as you understand, intimately, the shape of its ending.

wrong answer, you trembling little cunt.

i could compose arias to the dulcet tones of men boiling alive in their own skin. it never gets old. it’s the simple things, you know?

‘you told me once that you would crave me in any lifetime, across every eternity. and i wanted to tell you… i’d find you in all of them. at the end of everything, when the stars winked out one by one. in the dark and the cold and the nothing. so i’ll wait for you in some other forever. where there’s no blade between us. when we can mean more than nothing.’

‘i’d crave you in any lifetime. across every eternity. every version of me would want every version of you, whether i lived on day or ten thousand years,’ i whisper against he mouth. ‘and damn me, you were a good time.’

this is the woman who’s scratched her name into my soul with bloody fingernails. the one who cuts with her words and fucks like she’s fighting.

‘who do you want to be, then?’ he asks, soft as a secret. softer than he has any right to be.
yours.
what comes out is: ‘how would you kiss me if i were your lover? if you could take me any way you wanted, no holding back?’

it’s barely a kiss at all. just a tentative graze, a careful sharing of breath. a hesitant question and an equally hesitant answer, full of all the unspoken things simmering between us.