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Listlessly she pushes a carrot around her plate with a fork. “The chain won’t let me leave the grounds.”
“No. It won’t.” Not until I rescind my vow to marry her.
She raises accusing eyes to mine. “You won’t let me leave. You could free me.”
“Yes,” I agree softly. “But I won’t.”
Her jaw clenches and her lips tremble as she stares at me with hatred shining from the blue of her eyes. Abruptly she pushes away from the table, collecting her dishes to carry into the kitchen.
“I will let you leave the room,” I tell her. “Does that please you?”
She hurls her plate at my head.
I have always loved that Cora is a fighter. I’ve always loved that she never gives up.
But I cannot bear another day of watching this.
The beast urges me to run as I cross the great lawn, and I give in to that urge, my focus tight on Cora’s figure ahead, never allowing him to break through my skin.
Each of her sobbing, gasping breaths rips a gaping hole into my heart. The long golden chain is tense as a wire, stretching from her nape to the hall in the distance, yet she’s still straining against it. Fighting.
Let her fight me, instead.
Roughly I snag my arm around her waist and swing her up against my chest. “That’s enough!”
“Let me go!” She screams as I begin carrying her back toward the manor house. Instantly the tension on the chain eases. “Damn you, Gideon. Go back!”
Her voice is hoarse, from choking or sobbing or both. Bruises ring her neck, and her skin is raw and reddened. There’s not a chance in hell that I’ll let her go and I am not turning back.
Her fists land solid blows against my shoulders. Wild kicks send sharp pains shooting through my shins.
The beast loves it. My cock is a thick iron bar that grows hotter and harder with every blow she lands.
I don’t love it. Not when her ragged sobs accompany every hit, not when her struggles rapidly weaken until she’s lying limp against my chest, weeping helplessly against my shoulder.
“You will never do this again.” Forced through the raw ache of my throat, the command is harsh and thick. “If you do, I will lock the doors so that you cannot even leave the house.”
“Then I will jump from a window!”
Cold fear pierces my skin, the beast trying to claw through the holes her words ripped in me. “Do not even say such a thing!” I roar and when she flinches against me, burying her face against my throat, I have to fight for the calm before I speak again. “Would you?”
In a quiet voice, she says, “No.”
Yet it must have crossed her mind. Hoarsely I ask, “Do you want to escape me so badly?”
“I want to be free!” Despair fills her cry and she pounds her fist against my chest. “Do you not understand the difference?”
I do. But I can’t let her go yet.
And at least she is fighting again. “Will you marry me, Cora?”
“Fuck off,” she says.
For days, Cora takes her meals to her chambers instead of joining me at the table. As the moon wanes and March becomes April, my time with her grows shorter—but she is not completely absent. I watch her from the tower as she spends each day working in the south garden, and although she rarely strays from the northwest wing, the entire house is filled with her scent. Each breath I take carries her into me, her sweet fragrance—tinged with the cold bitterness I know too well after years spent alone.
With every step, that loneliness hangs around her like a shroud.
Perhaps that is why she finally joins me again. This time I do not immediately ask her to marry me, but allow the tension to ease out of the silence between us—and allow her the first word.
It comes near the end of the meal, when she quietly asks, “What happened to your dad and mum?”
“They were killed.”
She looks up, her eyes meeting mine. The soft reluctance in those blue depths grips my heart, her regret that she has asked and caused me pain. Yet determination shines there, too. “How?”
I lean back in my chair, unflinchingly return her stare. “Do you think I did it?”
Her gaze shifts away from mine—not in an admission of guilt, but as she pensively studies the walls, the faint bloodstains left on the rug, the shattered mirror, and the divan with its upholstery slashed in parallel stripes. “No,” she finally says. “I don’t know what to think of many things, beginning with the slaughtered deer I ran across in the grove, or the blood that was all over your face and hands. But never once has it occurred to me that you were the one who killed your parents. Though now I wonder if I should? Yet I still don’t. I don’t think you could have ever hurt them.”
The shield I had slapped over my heart, preparing for the stabbing wounds of her accusation and doubt, crumbles into nothing as those knives never appear. Yet my chest still feels pierced through. She has no reason to still have faith in me, to believe in me. Yet she does, and it’s everything I can do not to reach for her, to draw her close.
“I did not,” I tell her through a throat that feels hot and swollen. “They were attacked by the same monstrous bastard who chased us on your birthday.”
A murderous fiend who’d claimed Blackwood Manor as part of his territory while my parents and I searched for answers regarding the curse. When we returned, he came to kill me. He ran across my parents first.
Her lips part. “There was really someone out there that night? I told myself afterward that it only seemed so terrifying. And that it’d really been a wild boar or some feral dog.”
That is what I needed her to believe—and could hardly believe the
truth myself. But I had seen the howling nightmare that lunged at me as I’d forced my way through the gap in the gate. I’d seen the gleaming fangs, and the claws that ripped into my leg. It had been past midnight, but the moon had been full and high and bright, and I’d recognized what had come after us.
A myth. A legend. Something out of a horror film, not something real.
Yet it had been.
And I’d known what it was, but I could not bear her terror. So I’d laughed with her, teased her as we’d made our way back to the manor house, all the while feeling the beast’s curse winding its way through my blood.
My parents believed my claim that a werewolf had attacked us, but I didn’t have to convince them—or Cora’s father. The security cameras mounted atop the estate wall had captured everything.
“So he came back?” she whispers now.
“He came back.”
“And killed them?” Her eyes swim with tears.
“Yes.”
“Were you here?”
Slowly I nod. Though it had been during the full moon, so it was not only me. My beast had been out hunting on the estate grounds and heard their screams.
“What happened?”
“This time I was stronger than he was,” I say simply.
Her trembling lips press together as she looks tearfully around the room again. “Is that when all of this damage happened? And in the parlor…and the other rooms…and your bedchamber…”
She trails off, as if recognizing even as she spoke how little sense that made.
“They were outside,” I tell her. “This…was something else.”
The beast, returning from his hunts bloodied and sated with raw meat, yet still searching for what he knew was missing. Because he had memories of her, too, my memories of her in every room. And he had torn each chamber apart in his frustration when he could never find her.
But what the beast had done in this wing was nothing compared to the damage he’d done to the gatehouse. He’d torn apart the very floorboards in his search for the missing half of his soul.
I still awaken in her garden after every full moon, naked and half-buried in the dirt, as if he’d tried to cover himself in the same soil he knew she’d once touched—or as if praying she might come and tend to him as she once had tended to everything that had ever been planted there.
