It was a game we played, the Beast more than willing of a participant.
I’d release him on the surface and he’d roam the perimeter of the lands, refusing to hunt deer or small animals, instead always searching for her.
She’d hide somewhere and he’d find her, lunging, desperate for the puncture of his teeth through her skin again. But she always escaped through the ground opening to carry us back into the Underrealm once again.
Except the time she didn’t.
It was my fault. I took the full blame. I had become too accustomed to needing the events after our fall. I looked forward to them too much to notice that she tripped over a broken statue in the courtyard gardens, and had not bled over the snow, diving into the Underrealm. The Beast caught on before I did, ravagingher skirts, shredding them before his bite locked into the skin of her thigh, pulling a scream from her lips and a desperate cry from mine.
After I carried her to our rooms, I relieved her of the fever as I had before, apologizing again and again. When my mouth was over her wound, she begged in her fevered state for me to take her. For me to fuck her as she dreamt of me.
I refused.
I pressed my lips over her skin, licking the marks of teeth and she moaned. “Please. Please, Arthur.”
Goddess, I was so hard, I had to adjust myself. “Not until you can tell me what you took in payment for the cost of your curse when you were sixteen years old.”
My tongue swept over her again, and I breathed fully at the heat pooling between her legs. “It was…it…” Her voice faltered as she drifted. She wasn’t even lucid enough to remember, and I’d not have her unless all of her was with me.
On the third day, I woke in our bed to her soft lips on my chin, my cheek, lightly pressing over my eyes.
“A rose,” she whispered. “It was a rose I wanted the day my life changed forever.”
She dropped her head to my chest, her mess of black hair tangled and frizzy. I smoothed it from her face. “Tell me what happened.”
“You know this story already.”
I lifted her chin to meet my gaze. “Tell me anyway.”
The brush of a smile lifted her lips and she began. “My father left the Brackish Wood a week before my sixteenth birthday, promising to return soon after with a gift. He said he’d bring something we didn’t have. Something that grew in the human kingdoms.”
I did know this story. I’d read her written rendition twenty times—a hundred times—but hearing it from her lips was a gift in itself.
“My mother stayed behind with me, overseeing the construction of the Brackish Castle. Even now I remember how silent she’d been. Cold and distant. I figured it was my father’s leaving that had her snapping at anything I did or said right up to the day I turned sixteen, for she loved him more than anything in all of Revelry.
“The night of the next Cursed Moon was two days away when we received word of his death. He’d been traveling back to us with a single red rose as a gift to me. A storm had caught him, blowing him off course. He slammed into a tree and broke his neck. He should have known better than to shift in such weather, but he was trying to make it back to us on the night of my birthday. He was found a few days later with a single crumpled rose in his hand.”
I stroked her hair as she retold the story of her beginning. Our childhoods had been so similar, so bereft of the love we needed. I’d been drawn to her from the first words on the page, just as I was drawn to her now, feeling her there on my chest, but also heavily in my heart.
“My mother withered away within days. The Cursed Moon came and went. She did not deliver any of the curses that had come from the Veil. I remember how they came to her. It was different for each Cursebringer over the centuries and hers came from a broken tree in the Brackish Wood. The Veil was thin there and she’d collect them between the pages of books. Each curse would settle into the words, waiting to be delivered.” She paused, rubbing her temple. “It never made sense to me why she’d chosen such a vessel. Curses fit nicely into vials and jars, so why she’d chosen books of all things—and they were less common back then—I don’t know.”
“Someone’s story within a story perhaps?”
She lifted her head with a grin. “You know, you might be right. That’s very…whimsical. My mother used to think like that.”
I pulled her up, nestling her head between my shoulder and jaw. “But your mother had hidden a curse. It remained undelivered on purpose.”
“Yes,” she breathed into my neck, tracing over the bare skin of my chest with one finger. “She met my father on the way to deliver his curse. Back then, it was a simple thing. He’d be cursed to meet a beautiful woman who would fall in love with him and he’d never know. He’d never be able to give her love.”
“She knew it was her.”
Reshina nodded. “She did. As soon as she saw him, she understood she was the beautiful woman. She was the one who would love him. And he would never give her love in return.”
“So she hid the curse and fell in love with him anyway.”
“Yes,” Reshina sighed. “By the time I was born, she’d forgotten it. The curse grew and grew over a century. By the time they’d made me, it might as well have been a dream. All in her head.
“But after my father’s death, she was a broken woman with no path to recovery. She blamed me for my father’s death. Blamed me enough to go mad. One night, I slept in her room to watch over her. By then, the title of Cursebringer was dangerously close to becoming mine, and my mother was not done in her raging grief. She snuck away in the night while I slept and dug up the book where she had kept my father’s curse.
