And Astra could not imagine how I felt, to be seventeen and cornered by a man I’d thought loved me. Had I been twenty-four at his first proposal, I would have accepted it, and perhaps I never would have seen his anger until the contract had been signed.
“Basing marriage on age is foolish,” I said. “If she cannot find agoodman, then better to be forty and unmarried instead of twenty, married, and miserable.”
Callista rolled her eyes and told me that, in a few years, I would understand.
“Or maybe you never will,” she added wistfully. “Beauties always marry young.”
She was a beauty. Astra was a beauty. Beauty had nothing to do with it, yet people always used it as a dart against me thanks to my terribly unsubtle name.
I was unlucky, and I’d caught the eye of a demon. But if I tried to tell Callista as much, she would roll her eyes and sigh. Whimsical Beauty, conjuring fanciful ideas. I was always the young, naïve one who would eventually learn the true way of the world.
So I told no one.
And I tried to manage Stephan on my own.
Although Beast let me see his face now, he kept his distance when we shared a room, and if there were shadows, that was where he preferred to lurk. He never came within arm’s reach of me, which was preferable and yet somehow offensive.
For the next two days, he came to the library in the afternoons, but he stayed hunched and cast me furtive glances, seemingly ready at any moment for me to realize what he was and run screaming from the castle. As if I’d looked at him without really seeing him yet.
For my part, I found myself trying to get him to smile, but if he responded to any jokes I tried, it was only to duck away. He smiled at walls, but he would not smile at me.
“I’m not ashamed of you,” I finally announced, snapping my book closed and setting it aside. “I’m not the one asking you to hide. You’re hiding yourself.”
“You’re hiding too,” he said.
Not for the first time, I hated his sharp observations. He cloaked himself with shadows and raised shoulders; I cloaked myself with plain linen and amusement.
So I tried to reach beyond the amusement to honesty—
—and the words I found were:
“I’m ashamed of Beauty.”
The fire crawled inside me. I breathed carefully, trying not to stoke the flames.
Beast looked at me from the corner of the library, his yellow eyes bright in the shadows. “What happened?”
I would never understand how that rough, snarling voice could be so gentle.
But even so, I couldn’t say it, couldn’t relive it and make it real with words. Each one would fuel the monster inside me, and I had already burned enough.
I was ready to leave when he changed his question.
“If you could be someone other than Beauty, who would you be?”
“Orla Byrne.” I struggled to find a whimsical smile. “From across the sea. A pirate queen.”
“Daring,” he observed, that same steady tone he’d used on a peasant with runaway potatoes.
My smile came a little easier. I sat straight in my armchair and threw myself wholeheartedly into the whimsy.
“When I was barely fifteen and scrawny as a pea pod, a pirate ship came to loot my village. I snuck aboard the vessel and defeated every man at one-on-one combat, claiming the ship as my own. Since then, I am undefeated in battle, aided by my great weapon, Ruiner, forged from fairy steel in a dragon’s flame.”
As I waved my hand, the castle’s own sense of humor manifested in my palm in the shape of a child’s wooden sword. I nearly choked in surprise, though the enchantments should have long ago ceased to astonish me.
“A fierce weapon,” Beast agreed, steady as ever.
But there it was, that smile. Turned not on a wall but on me. The expression was unnatural on an animal face, pulling his upper lip back to reveal his fangs, more snarl than smile. But somehow it was all the more endearing for the ridiculousness.
