If he was under an enchantment that only a marriage agreement could break, he had the wrong girl in his castle. Astra could have married him; she would be happy to marry wealth regardless of feelings. But perhaps the castle would vanish with his enchantment. Perhaps every benefit would vanish, and his good temper too, and all that would be left would be the soulless chains of marriage to a true monster. Perhaps he was a wicked man who’d been transformed into a gentle beast. It would fit a fairy’s sense of twisted humor and irony.
There were too many possibilities for me to guess at the truth, and I owed him nothing. I owed nothing to any man. I couldn’t—
I realized there was something different in the silence.
“Beast?”
He was gone.
Chapter
9
In my room that evening, a sheet of parchment arrived. Beast had copied down the line about the woodcutter’s regret, and I couldn’t tell if he was answering my question about a fairy wish or simply apologizing for trying to propose again.
I tucked the parchment away in my desk, and I tried to tuck my inquisitive mind away just the same.
The next day, I halted on the threshold of the library and turned my steps to the gardens instead. I walked the fragrant paths, reaching out to brush my fingertips across velvety petals, and when I sat on a bench, I felt a familiar presence behind me.
“Why do you love roses so much?” I asked.
“I don’t.”
I stiffened. “My father’s punishment was for taking a rose. The door to my room has roses carved beside my name.”
“The castle draws people in,” he said at last, and there was almost an apology in his tone. “It chose your room.”
“But you were the one who threatened my father.”
Silence. Then, in that same apologetic tone, “I was.”
I was getting too close to the truth again, investigating without meaning to.
Grabbing at a different track of conversation, I said, “I was not surprised when he brought it home. The gold rose. Father is hardworking, but he revels in what his hard work brings him. He pretends he has recovered from losing his fortune, that he can be content with a country life, but the greed is still in his eyes, and even after all the hospitality of the castle, he could not resist the glint of it on his way out.”
It was too much to ask a man to resist the beauty before him—Stephan would have said that. He would have said it was my father’s right to take what he wanted by force. He would have said the rose had deliberately planted itself in my father’s path to tempt him.
“Men fall for the sake of a rose,” I said. “Perhaps that is why I prefer the company of a beast.”
I took the path again in silence. I expected him to leave, but I continued to feel his presence at my back, and I heard the gentle disturbances of footfalls on the ground behind me and the brush of reaching plants against a moving form. So I walked without looking back.
I had finished a circuit of the buttercups and the lady’s mantle before Beast spoke again.
“The rose was not gold when he took it. It looked ... ordinary.”
“Don’t say that,” I murmured, heart tightening.
If I could write off my father’s act as greed, it was easy to stay in the castle, not missing him. If I could pretend Stephan’s failings were shared by all, I could keep all at arm’s length. But if they insisted on being human, on being complicated, I would have to pick through the pieces carefully, see the intentional harm when I didn’t understand it, try to find where the cracks had begun, wonder if I should have noticed them sooner. I would pick through the tray of glass fragments until every piece was slick with blood and I could no longer see the edges and I was no closer to understanding and all I felt was the pain.
I came to a stop on the path. “My mother.” I clenched my jaw, drew in a breath. “He thinks of her whenever he sees them.”
Papa was a literal man, not a cruel one, and his love for my mother was genuine. I had never expected that fact to make me shrivel inside, to make me feel bitterness rather than hope. But I had simmered long enough to go sour. The rot was so deep in my soul, I saw it everywhere. I saw greed and cruelty where it did not belong—in my father, in my brother.
In the beast.
Just then, he said my name, soft and barely audible.
I waited.
