Beauty in Spring (Beauty #1)(10)

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.

And each time, he dug holes that destroyed more and more of what she’d left behind. Hating himself for it, as I hated him for it.

Yet still unable to help himself.

But I will not awaken in her garden on the morning after this next full moon. If she cannot accept us, I will not awaken at all. And the beast will never destroy anything of hers again.

Those icy, bitter fingers wrap around my heart. I try to warm it with a swallow of burgundy, but wine is still not what I want on my tongue. “You’ve made progress in your garden.”

“You watched that from your tower, too?” The same cold bitterness clutching at my heart fills her reply. “You should have come down and helped me.”

After she had avoided me for days? “Do you truly want me so near to you?”