The glass shattered beneath me, and I lifted Reshina, preventing her from kneeling on the shards. She pulled me over to find my shirt torn and the skin of my back flayed in glass.
“What an entrance, Arthur,” she laughed, pulling out a rather large piece with gusto. I winced as she kissed my lips, tearing out another.
“This fall might be the death of me,” I grunted.
“Nonsense. You’re already healing. Just a few more and?—”
“Fuck.” I grimaced as another shard left my skin. “Kill me now and take me out of my misery.”
She snorted into my neck just the way I loved and kissed my shoulder. “There. Already healing over. No worse for wear.”
I flipped her on her back, exploring her mouth, nipping at her lip. “If you’ll not kill me, Goddess, then marry me.”
Her mouth opened and shut half a dozen times before I went on. “Marry me. Make me your husband. Give me your hand andgive me your mornings, your nights. Give me all the time between to call you my wife.”
“You cannot possibly want?—”
“Oh, but I do.” I threaded my hands behind her head. “You need not say you love me. I do not ask for the impossible. I ask you to accept me as yours.”
As if she was frozen, she stared, her eyes wide.
“Marry me,” I whispered again. “Say yes.”
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes, pressing my forehead to hers. “The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.”
We were marriedon a gray winter day over a year after she came to me. Piffle ordained the ceremony. We held it in the library. Reshina dressed in a layered gown of black, sparkling in the low candlelight.
I do not know what I wore.
I do not know what I said or if I even combed my hair that morning—the only thing I was sure I’d done was tell her I would be her husband and love her for all the time I had left in this world.
I presented her with a ring I’d crafted myself—something I’d never done before, but needed to get right the first time. I’d spent months hiding the metalworking books I was reading from her—taking quick peeks at them when she was helping Piffle in the kitchen. Reading chapters in the dead of night while she slept soundly in our bed, her wings taking up so much of the space, I had little but a thin edge.
Crafting the actual ring was even more difficult. There were times she believed me to be on the surface as the Beast when inreality, I was in the pantry, carving away at the band. I worked to create the illusion of feathers into the gold, setting small diamonds into them to represent the silver tips of her wings—placing the perfect precious stone of black onyx at the center. Piffle brought it by my request from Riche in a cut calledmarquise. It was regal. It was bold. It was her.
As I’d placed it on her finger, Reshina had struggled through the wording of the ceremony, adjusting what she was supposed to say. I didn’t even think twice about it, just steadied myself not to upheave the contents of my stomach on her perfectly polished pointed heeled shoes.
I made love to her so softly that night, she cried. And no matter my consoling, she would not stop, pouring all of her tears into wails of anguish. Of all the men who’d loved her over the centuries, I was the only one who’d promised not to leave her. And I meant it. She couldn’t love me, but she could be with me and that was all I had to hope for in the world.
We spent months redecorating the corridors, cooking together, reading, dancing, writing our story in a draft I couldn’t even look over without tears brimming in my eyes. Becoming her husband had softened my edges, redirected my purpose, and given me the simplest and honest truth—everything had been worth it to wake up each morning next to her.
Over a year after the curse had dragged her into the Underrealm, Reshina was mine. The Beast settled so calmly, so quietly, rarely roaming the surface, rarely speaking up as long as she was near, as if her presence was a comfort to us both.
She wrote dozens of letters to her children, tossing them into the fire, crumpling them, tearing them to pieces. She said she couldn’t find a way to come back into their lives that would benefit them.
I held her when she cried then, too.
I lived each day loving her with the intrinsic fear that one day, our world would shatter. We did not have all the time wewanted. It was a finite thing to love a Goddess trapped in the Underrealm. Loved and happy, but trapped all the same.
When the shattering did come, it came through a mouse.
With golden fur and a long golden tail, Piffle climbed up my chair next to the fire in the library, so small, I didn’t see him until he whispered in my ear.
“Master!” he squeaked, and I startled, snapping my book shut. “Do not alert the Mistress!”
My gaze darted to Reshina. She was bent over the latest book we’d been passing back and forth, writing notes and ideas about the story as we read the chapters together.
