I closed my eyes and filled my lungs.
“Did anyone else have a room in the castle before me?” My voice rasped from a raw throat.
“Once,” he admitted.
Truth. Here I was, seeking it again. I didn’t want to know. But I had to know. Truth was the thornbush on the path, and unless I pressed my way through it, I could never move forward again.
“Was she like me?” I turned enough to see him, though I kept my shoulder curled into the bookcase as if I could draw it around me like a blanket.
He was hunched in the corner, crouched low to the ground without sitting.
“No one is like you,” he said.
No, I didn’t think so either. No one could be this shattered and remain standing. Maybe I was the ghost.
“She saw me on her first day here. She was here only one day.”
Like putting a hand to a hot coal. He’d been burned once, and when I came, he’d refused to make the same mistake.
I recognized that kind of hesitation, that kind of scar.
“Ask me,” I said. “The question you have to ask.”
He flinched.
“Ask me.”
Without raising his eyes, he said, “Will you marry me, Beauty?”
I felt Stephan’s skin, saw Stephan’s eyes. I buried my arms to the elbows in the thornbush—
And I pushed a step forward.
“I can’t,” I said calmly, carefully, prevented from collapse only by the bookshelf beside me.
He looked at me, and I couldn’t read his expression. Mine was likely just as strange.
“I lived in a different castle once.” I swallowed. “And I gave a man a room. But when I wouldn’t give him anything else, he took the castle by force. And then I had nothing left to give.”
“Beauty.” The way Beast said my name in that moment was the most painful thing I’d ever heard. The secret I’d kept from my sisters, from my father, from Rob—I’d told it to a stranger.
Three times, Stephan asked me to marry him. Three times, I said no. After that he didn’t ask.
Three times, Beast asked me to marry him. Three times, I said no.
I waited to see what would come next.
He stayed in his corner, reached for me only with his gaze, but those yellow eyes pierced me to my soul.
“I promised you no harm,” he said. “From me, from anyone. You’re safe here.”
His words renewed my tears, but this was not the wracking sobs of before; instead, it was a gentle mourning that I hadn’t met him first. He would have liked the original Beauty, I thought. The confident, sharp-minded girl I’d been before my foundations cracked.
“Thank you,” I choked out. “You are the most decent man I’ve ever met. I’ve seen a true beast.”
If I could transfer the curse, I would. But all I had power to do was remove it, and I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Not when lifting the curse was certain to change him, and I couldn’t bear the uncertainty of change, of discovering him to be different than I’d imagined but only after I’d bound my life to his.
I wiped my tears and looked away. “You fought bravely, Andre. You have revenged your crew.”
