He thinks he’ll be remembered as the villain in the story”
She snorted.
“But I forgot to tell him,” I said too quietly, opening the door, “that the villain is usually the person who locks up the maiden and throws away the key.”
“Oh?”
I shrugged, “He was the one who let me out.

Don't let the hard days win.

Why should I bother defending myself," Nesta said with lethal cold, "to a male who is so puffed up on his own sense of importance there's barely enough space in the room for his enormous head?

But I wouldn’t sit in my room, couldn’t allow myself to mourn and mope and weep and sleep. So I would venture out, even if it was an agony…

That girl that had needed to be protected, who had craved stability and comfort . . . she had died Under the Mountain. I had died, and there had been no one to protect me from those horrors before my neck snapped. So I had done it myself. And I would not, could not, yield that part of me that had awoken and transformed Under the Mountain.

A queen who owned her body, her life, her destiny, and never apologized for it.