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I should have bit off his tongue when I had the chance. “What makes you think I’m so easy to get rid ofnow?”
“I can tell people you tried to sabotage me at the ball. Dumped blood on my true love. They love a tale about a jealous witch.” He fixes his hair and shirt, and edges past me to the door.
“Coward,” I sneer.
Shutting his eyes, he breathes the word in.
I follow his exit into the shadowed antechamber, the buzz of my body a betrayal of everything I should feel.
Coward, coward, coward,coward.
I could set fire to this tower right now. Part of me wants to, just to scour the evidence of what occurred—just so that the worst thing I’ve done isn’t kissing Cyrus.
Our steps clatter and echo down the stairwell. “You can’t run from this,” I say as I catch up to him.
Cyrus goes still, knuckles white on the banister.
“You—”
“Shh.”
Is someone else here? “Let—”Them hear,I mean to say, but Cyrus claps his shaking hand over my mouth.
A bracing terror rims his pupils. He points below at the single entry point of the tower.
I hear it before I see it: a low, scratchy growl filling the silence of our held breaths.
Not someone.Something.
I don’t know what to expect when I glance below. Nothing I know makes that sound, and now, heart pounding in my ears, I can’t hear anything at all.
One enormous clawed limb grasps the archway. Leaves and rose petals blow in with the breeze. A hulking silhouette blocks the dim light of dawn.
Beast.
It maneuvers inside, one spiral horn after the other, too big to fit through all at once. It isn’t like the finely wrought mask that Cyrus wore to the ball; no, this is the beast I sawin my dreams, a patchwork of shaggy fur and moss, no elegance to its shape. A shawl of jagged bramble wraps its torso, giving it the impression of a wolf caught in underbrush, except I’ve never seen a wolf lumber on its hind legs. It’s a creature of storybooks—the terrible ones, told to deter children from wandering.
The beast peers up the stairwell with glowing green eyes, nostrils flaring, fangs bared.It knew we were here,some instinct alerts me. I can tell in the way it breathes us in, in the purposeful tilt of its head.
It charges.
“Shit!”I bolt up the steps, the prince at my heels. The whole structure shudders as the beast crashes up the stairwell. I trip and only barely catch myself on the banister. Cyrus, leaping two steps at a time, overtakes me and hauls me up.
Clumsy with terror, I lunge for the open door to my rooms, though I already know a slab of wood won’t be enough to keep the beast at bay; I saw the glint of its claws, long as knives. We’ll be trapped.
Something swipes my back, sharp and cold. I twist away, my hands finding a flower vase in the corner of the antechamber. I fling it at the mass behind me.
Porcelain shatters. The beast stumbles.
I grab the vase stand, made of sturdy wrought iron. Bracing myself, I shove the beast backward with it, trying to get some leverage before it comes to its senses again.
Steel flashes at the corner of my eye. The beast roars, pained, clutching its arm.
Cyrus, sword drawn, circles around to stand in betweenit and me. Blood—I don’t know whose—smears his cheek and stains his shoulder. “Go! Get help! I’ll distract it.” He brings down the sword again.
I’m nearly too shocked to move. A clear path to the stairs opens up, and I dart past the fighting. Bleeding and dizzy, I could faint, but if I don’t make it down, we’re dead. I know how to survive, and it’s to never stop running.
Cold air rushes into my lungs as I burst out of the tower onto the petal-strewn landing, barefoot. The sounds of struggle grow more distant with each stride. There are guards across the bridge beyond the palace gates, if I can just reach them.
