Page 2 of Beast’s Surrender, Beauty’s Revenge

CHAPTER TWO

ALMAS

I was not, would never be, Lord Uther’s plaything.

It was a promise that I’d made to myself on my first midsummer festival after turning sixteen, when the lord himself had brought me a drink and smiled in an oil-slick manner that made my skin crawl. He had leaned over and gripped my thigh tight, his hand sliding up, moving flesh beneath his incessant touch, and I?—

I’d never been touched before. Not like that, so possessively.

His hand alone had been enough to pin me to my seat and when I had squirmed, he’d smiled.

“Like that, do you?” he’d asked, and I could still smell the sourness of his breath, feel it as it fell across my cheek.

But I hadn’t liked it; I’d been terrified. It’d been the first time I had realized there was something beyond sweet kisses and fond affection, something dark in the hearts of men that’d turned Uther’s hunger into something ravenous.

And I had assumed, in time, he would tire of me. It was often spoken in the village that he liked young men, took one after the other to his manor for a time, then let them go back to their families.

I’d thought his attention would drift, especially as I grew older.

It hadn’t. If anything, my refusal had made him more stubborn.

So I found myself trekking through the cursed Black Forest, for there was nothing between the trees more devilish and unwelcome than Lord Uther himself. Should I die out there? Well, it would be a pity for my father, but I remained firmly convinced that it was better to die in the forest, made food for some horrible beast, than to submit myself to Lord Uther. I would not break the promise I’d made myself.

Moreover, I would see Uther pay for ever putting me in that position. These past four years, he had taken so very much from me. First, fun—the idea that I could relax and enjoy the company of those closest to me without pretense. At social gatherings now, I was tense, wary, looking for where he might spring out at me, careful to dodge out of groups that he approached.

Then, he had taken my friends. It was difficult to keep them, as my family fell out of favor with the local lord. My father’s tinkering could only provide so much, and though I’d taken on an apprenticeship with the cobbler, even that had disappeared after a while. I was to have nothing, it seemed, beyond what Lord Uther gave me. At least, not until I gave him what he desired.

So in our destitution, my friends had drifted away, afraid to court Lord Uther’s ire when he thought any one of them had gotten too close.

My last friend, my best friend, Lara—she’d stood by me through everything, but when Lord Uther had had her flogged for adultery of all things, she had turned me away when I tried to visit as she recovered. Finally, once she was back on her feet, she tearfully told me that she couldn’t—couldn’t risk it anymore. Not for her family.

She’d said she was sorry, and while I understood the distance she kept from me moving forward, it broke my heart.

Isolation had turned me brittle, and in my darkest moments, I wondered if it was all worth it. How bad could it really be, to please Lord Uther and let all of this end? It wasn’t too late for me to scrabble my life back together, and—and with his favor, couldn’t it be better than ever before?

But I couldn’t stand the thought, and when my father found me, tear-stained face pressed into my knees, he had told me that what I wanted mattered more than all of that. He’d started putting money aside, only pennies at a time, with the hope that we could one day leave.

And then, Lord Uther had taken him from me too. It was a ridiculous charge, something to do with unpaid taxes. But I had known, when the guard led my father out of the courthouse, that it had nothing to do with what little income Uther could extract from my family.

No, he had paused on his way down to the carriage to sneer at me. “I would love to discuss your father’s release. Perhaps over dinner if you’d be so kind as to visit my manor.”

It had taken all of my strength not to spit in his face, but from those wooden steps outside the courthouse, I’d marched directly down, through the streets of the town where everyone shrank away from me as if I’d been poisonous. Perhaps I was. My head was swimming with murderous rage. I was no longer myself, and if I never was again, I would still exact my revenge on the man who’d stolen everything from me.

It was only that I had decent shoes from my time with the cobbler that I managed my way through the forest as well as I did. I was blundering, no tracker or huntsman or woodsman. I did not know where I was going, beyond north and north and north, because while I did not have the strength to unseat a lord, there were whispers of one who did—a great beast who’d nearly felled a whole kingdom.

The beast would take Uther’s head and spill his blood across the marble floors of his damned manor house, and if he killed everyone else besides? All the better.

They had all abandoned me to this, abandoned my father. Not one person in the village had spoken up for him against this obvious ploy. Not one had offered their aid to me in the aftermath.

No, I would see them all scream before the end. Let them all become the deranged, haggard thing Lord Uther had made me.

For days, I marched through the woods, hungry and exhausted, sleeping between the roots of trees, my clothes muddy. I laughed to myself, half-mad, to think that Uther wouldn’t even want me now. He’d liked me for my dark hair, my soft, pale skin, my blood-red lips. Now, that skin was covered in grime. It’d been clawed by vicious branches. My lips were chapped and I didn’t doubt my eyes were hazy and mad.

I might die in the wilderness before ever finding what I sought. The fourth night, when wolves howled in the distance, I was sure that they’d come for me.

But the fifth morning—oh, the fifth morning, I saw a tower of stone, almost hidden behind the overgrowth of trees, abandoned.

My heart thrilled.

This was it. It had to be. And if it wasn’t, then I was done. This tower would be my salvation or my end.

With a firm resolve, I pushed the vines aside and opened the door, but the inside of the tower was dark, almost as if it were night even though the sky outside shone the rosy pink of sunrise. The only windows in the tower were high up on the wall, casting a shaft of light across the round space that did nothing to illuminate the floor below me.

I could only see the narrow platform in front of me, shadows opening ahead, like if I’d blindly walked forward, I could have fallen to my death. There was no railing to stop me from blundering toward a quick death.

Instead, I took the spiral stairs around the inner wall. The shadows only deepened the farther down I went, but I had no torch of my own. I used my hand to guide myself, stepping more carefully when I could no longer see.

And finally, my feet crunched on dirt instead of stone, and I skimmed a toe out to test in front of me. Yes, the floor was firm. I’d reached the bottom.

In the dark, I heard a grunt and the rattle of chains.

Then, torches sparked to life, a strange magic drawing out the light.

I hadn’t known what to expect from the supposed beast, but I had imagined a giant creature, half wolf and half man. The stories said that he could be controlled by a master, but I’d expected a slavering thing.

Instead, he was a man—a brute of a man, to be sure, but still, his shirtless torso was marked by no more than an average amount of hair. His hair hung around his face, which was turned downward, his eyes shut against the sudden light.

I stepped forward. “Hello, Beast,” I murmured. “I have need of you.”