If I Cant Have You / Literature

• Huron: In Dragon Bones'', Ward encounters a woman who thinks this about him. It's not so much that she really loves him, she's just insulted that he'd prefer someone else to her.
• The Phantom of the Opera. If Erik can't have Christine, not only will Raoul be dead, but he plans to blow up the Paris Opera House. This tends to be forgotten in most other versions. Bonus points for the fact that Erik retains much of his woobieness, despite being batshit crazy.
• Éponine from Les Misérables. Éponine gives Marius a (fake) message that his friends are expecting him at the barricades, and then she goes there herself in hopes that they'll die together, since she can't have him. But later, when Marius is about to be shot, Eponine quickly interferes and is shot herself. She gives the letter to Marius, pleads for forgiveness, and asks for a kiss on the forehead, to which he complies.
• In The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves, the Nephilim just want to be loved, completely and unconditionally, by the humans they choose. And to make sure you'll always love them, they'll kill everyone else you love, or who loves you, to make sure you're all theirs.
• This happened in the Wind on Fire trilogy to the princess, though she didn't get killed.
• This is effectively Morgoth's motive in The Silmarillion—if Ilúvatar won't let him create anything of his own, he'll corrupt and break Arda.
• In Neil Gaiman's short story "Murder Mysteries," the first murdered angel turns out to have been killed by his partner when he moved on from extensively studying Love with him to studying Death instead.
• The title character of The English Patient has an affair with Katharine Clifton; when her husband finds out, he combines this with Murder the Hypotenuse and suicide, trying to kill them all in a plane crash.
• Don Quixote: Part II, chapter 60, Claudia Jeronima and Don Vicente Tornellas, from different factions of the civil war that was plaguing Barcelona, secretly fall in love and planned to marry, but one day Claudia Jeronima learned that Don Vicente wants to marry another woman. The next day, overwhelmed and exasperated, she shot him. And then she learns that he never intended to marry any other woman than Claudia.
• In the first novel of the Binding Of The Blade series, Joraiem marries Wylla, whom Rulalin loved. One morning, Rulalin knifes Joraiem and bolts.
• Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He utters the line "No-one shall have her" quite a few times over the course of the story, which ends up badly for Esmeralda (and everyone else in the story).
• Christopher Carrion has a bad case of this in the back story to Clive Barker's "Abarat" series aimed at Princess Boa, which ends with him killing her on her wedding day.
• In ''Cold Comfort'', Allie Carpenter says the stock phrase before killing Senator Wainwright.
• The Revenge of the Sith novelization has the relationship between Anakin and his wife Padmé steadily progress into this. Even though she was faithful to him, he didn't believe her; he believed she was falling for Obi-Wan. And in a sense she was - at one point she says that there is one Jedi the proto-Rebellion can trust absolutely and is shocked to discover that she doesn't mean her husband. He chokes her with the Force.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Shadows In Zamboula," after Zabibi repulses Totrasmek, and asks him for a Love Potion, he gives her something to drive her lover mad, so that he attacks her.
• Meta-example happened in Dungeons & Dragons novels. Dragonlance writer Margaret Weis didn't like that her beloved character Death Knight Lord Soth has been taken by Ravenloft, so she got Armed with Canon, wrote things that made it impossible for Soth to ever be transported to Ravenloft's world in the first place and then turned him human and killed him so nobody else could have him.
• In Bruce Coville's The Ghost in the Third Row the ghost in question was killed by a jealous lover after she chooses his rival over him.
• In The Mysterious Mr. Quin short story The Face of Helen, Gillian eventually rejects one suitor to marry another. His engagement gifts (a radio and a bulbous glass sculpture) and request that she listen to a particular opera programme on the radio give her hope that they can still be friends, but the sculpture is really filled with poison gas, and the glass is set to break when the tenor hits his highest note. Mr Satterthwaite figures it out and rescues her just in time, and the culprit drowns himself knowing that his plan has failed and she will never love him back after what he's done.
• Lydia in Peter Moore's Caught In The Act attempts this on Ethan in the school play. She fails.
• In Death series: Indulgence In Death has a guy who killed a girl he was interested in a drunken fit of rage because she was not interested in him.
• In "Confessions of a D-List Supervillain", The hero Ultraweapon says this to the protagonist after erasing the memory of his ex-girl-friend Aphrodite, who had begun dating the protagonist.
• In "The Lady, or the Tiger?", a princess must decide whether to send her lover to his doom (the tiger) or allow him to live and marry another. Either way, she'll never have him again. Complicating matters is that she hates the "lady" and jealously wonders if that woman and her man were exchanging glances the whole time.
• In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Eve's motive for giving the apple to Adam is murder: he must not be happy with another woman after her death.
• The Infernal Devices: The reason for Sophie's scar - the son of her previous employer wanted her, and when she refused his advances, he took a knife to her face so that nobody could have her beauty.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire King Aerys II pulled a non-romantic example of this during the twilight of Robert's Rebellion. He ordered that caches of wildfire be placed throughout Kings Landing with the goal being to set the city on fire rather than let it fall to Robert Baratheon. Luckily, Jamie Lannister wasn't having any of The Mad King's bullshit and earned the title of Kingslayer by killing him.
• In The Tamuli, Zalasta stabs Sephrenia in the heart after being outed as the Big Bad of the series, although the motivation for that action was being reminded that she had rejected him in favor of Vanion.
• Jeremy's girlfriend in Strength & Justice says this phrase as she attempts to do this to him by using her Green Thumb powers when she suspects him of cheating.
• In Proxima, John Synge gets the first three words out before being shot by a genre savvy robot.
• In Blood Promise, Strigoi Dimitri seems to settle upon this conclusion. He initially intended to turn Rose into a fellow Strigoi and rule a criminal empire with her. Once she conclusively rejected him, he hunts around the world to locate and kill her.
• In The Extraordinaries Series, Owen/Shadow Star wants Nick to join him, but Nick refuses and chooses his best friend/crush, Seth/Pyro Storm. Owen then kidnaps Nick and tries to kill him and Seth.
• In Heart of Steel, Jim was already controlling and possessive of Julia, but after getting turned into a misshapen cyborg and finding out that Alistair is in love with her, Jim is prepared to kill Julia to keep Alistair from having her. He also staged a vicious attack on her six months ago when he started to cotton that she wanted to break up with him.
• Ashfur from Warrior Cats actually averts this. He wants Squirrelflight to suffer, so he plans to kill her kits in front of her and let her live with the horror.
• The Mistborn trilogy includes the freaky three-way baby of this, Love Redeems, and Entitled to Have You, wrapped up in a Muggle and Magical Love Triangle. Zane, the Mistborn son of one of the villains, is attempting to woo the heroine Vin away from her baseline-human, Non-Action Guy Love Interest (and Zane's half-brother) Elend. Unfortunately for him, Zane's Ax-Crazy - but he's convinced that she will be the good woman whose love will redeem him. She's tempted, but ultimately rejects him. Outraged, he tries to kill her (mixing the attempt in with a Forceful Kiss and a fair bit of Interplay of Sex and Violence), screaming, "You were supposed to save me!"
• The Tennyson poem Locksley Hall mentions this, although the narrator isn't so much of a dick as to actually try it. When his lover is forced into an Arranged Marriage, he thinks:
  Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand!
  (...)
  Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain—
  Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain''
• In The Three Musketeers, the English ambassador to France was willing to spark a war if he couldn't have Anne of Austria, the (married) Queen of France. He specifically noted that many thousands of people would be killed in such a war.
• In Two Little Girls in Blue, Norman didn't take his wife, Theresa, leaving him well, believing she thought he was never good enough for her; it was further exacerbated by the fact she left him shortly after their newborn twins died and married another, more successful man a year later. After learning she was pregnant again by her new husband - with twins no less - Norman abducted and murdered Theresa while she was on her way to a baby shower.
• Toni L.P. Kelner's series Where Are They Now? follows journalist Tilda Harper, who specializes in hunting down former stars. The target of her search in the first book, Curse of the Kissing Cousins, is one of the show's Mercy Ashford, and it turns out she went into hiding for this reason. Her controlling and abusive ex-boyfriend attacked and brutalized her after she had left him, and his father - despite his disapproval of the relationship - used his family connections to keep the ex out of jail for the attack while said ex continued searching for her obsessively for years afterward; when Tilda fakes Mercy's reappearance at a convention, he shows up to kill her and is finally arrested for his crimes.
• Nina Tanleven: In The Ghost in the Third Row, the backstory is that the Woman in White was the actress Lily Larkin, and was murdered by a jealous would-be boyfriend after she fell in love with his rival instead.
• Where the Crawdads Sing: Kya and Chase had a relationship a few years before Chase was found murdered, so his mother thinks Kya murdered him because she was jealous of his wife, Pearl. It's revealed in the end that Kya did kill Chase, but not because she was jealous; she did it because he'd attempted to rape her when she ended their relationship.
• In Lorna Doone, bandit Carver Doone has this general attitude towards the titular Lorna, his cousin who cannot stand him and is in fact hopelessly in love with John Ridd, the son of a local farmer murdered by the Doones. He resorts to kidnapping to ensure her hand in marriage. And once it becomes clear that she is actually not his cousin and that she will never be with him, he bursts into the chapel on her wedding day and shoots her in the stomach, though thankfully she gets better.
• A parental example in Unwind. Hayden’s parents divorced, and couldn’t decide who would get custody of him. In the end they decided to have him unwound, just so the other parent wouldn’t get custody.

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