Page 9 of The Beast’s Hidden Rose (Obsessed #8)

eight

. . .

Irish

Morning light filters through the studio windows, turning dust motes into floating diamonds.

I lie on my side watching Guy sleep, his face softer in unconsciousness, the perpetual furrow between his brows smoothed away.

We never made it back to either of our bedrooms last night.

After cleaning the worst of the paint from our skin in his studio bathroom, we collapsed onto the daybed in the corner, wrapped in each other, too exhausted for anything but sleep.

Now, in the gentle light of dawn, I study him with the same intensity he's studied me for years—the strong line of his jaw, the dark sweep of his lashes, and the scars. Always the scars.

The most noticeable one runs from his right temple down his cheek to his jaw—a jagged, angry line that looks like it was made by something sharp and wielded with force.

But it's not the only one. Now that I can look openly, I see others: a circular burn mark on his shoulder, thin white lines crisscrossing his back like a roadmap to some terrible history, a deep gouge along his ribs.

His body tells a story of violence that contradicts the gentle way his hands move across canvas, the careful way he touched me even in our most frenzied moments.

As if sensing my scrutiny, his eyes flutter open, instantly alert. His gaze finds mine, and for a moment, there's confusion, then recognition, then something softer I can't quite name.

"You're still here," he says, voice rough with sleep.

"Did you think I'd leave while you were sleeping?" I trace a finger along his collarbone, watching goosebumps rise in its wake.

"I've learned to expect disappointment." He captures my hand, brings it to his lips. "Waking up to find you watching me is... unexpected."

"I'm studying you," I admit. "The way you've studied me."

His mouth quirks, not quite a smile. "And what have you observed?"

I hesitate, uncertain if I should voice my thoughts. We've been intimate physically, but emotional intimacy feels like a different kind of vulnerability altogether.

"Your scars," I say finally. "I want to know how you got them."

His body tenses beneath my touch, his expression shuttering. "No, you don't."

"I do," I insist gently. "You know almost everything about me. You've watched me for years, painted me in my most private moments. But I know almost nothing about you."

He sits up, sheets pooling around his waist, creating distance between us. "There's a reason for that. Some stories shouldn't be told."

"How can I understand you if you won't let me see all of you?" I sit up too, letting the sheet fall away, using my nakedness as both vulnerability and challenge. "You demand complete access to me, but offer only fragments of yourself in return."

His eyes trace my exposed skin, but I can see he's withdrawing, pulling back behind whatever walls kept him isolated before I entered his life.

"Guy," I say, resting my hand on his chest, over his heart. "Please."

A long silence stretches between us. Just when I think he won't answer, he speaks, his voice distant, as if coming from somewhere deep underwater.

"My father believed pain was instructive." His eyes fix on some point beyond my shoulder. "When I showed interest in art instead of the family business, he decided I needed... instruction."

My heart constricts. "He hurt you."

"The face," he touches the long scar on his cheek, "was from a broken bottle.

I was sixteen, had just been accepted to art school.

He said if I wanted to be an artist so badly, he'd give me something interesting to paint.

" His laugh is hollow, empty of humor. "The back was a belt, over years.

The burn," he indicates his shoulder, "cigarette, when I was caught sketching instead of doing homework. "

I feel sick, imagining a younger Guy enduring such cruelty. "And your mother?"

"Left when I was four. Couldn't handle him either.

" He shrugs, a movement trying for casual but achieving only rigid control.

"He died ten years ago. Car accident. Poetic justice, I suppose, since the worst of these," he gestures to his face, "came from the car accident I was in at nineteen.

His drunk driving. The only time his 'lessons' affected him too. "

The clinical way he recites these horrors makes them worse somehow. Like he's talking about someone else's life, not the systematic abuse that shaped him.

"You survived," I say, finding his hand, squeezing it. "You built this life for yourself, became an artist despite him."

"I survived," he agrees. "But not unchanged. What happened... it twisted something in me. The need to control my environment, to isolate myself. The way I fixate, obsess." His eyes find mine, suddenly intense. "The way I watched you for years without approaching. Normal people don't do that, Iris."

"Normal is overrated," I echo his words from earlier. "And who gets to decide what's normal anyway?"

"Society. Laws. Basic human decency." His mouth twists. "All the boundaries I've crossed with you."

I consider this, turning over his confession in my mind. What he's done—the watching, the painting without consent, the manipulation to bring me here—it should repel me. Would repel most people. Yet here I am, naked in his bed, seeking to understand rather than judge.

What does that say about me?

Perhaps that I'm just as broken in my own way. That my history of feeling invisible, unimportant, has made the intensity of his focus feel like salvation rather than threat. That I too have been shaped by my past into someone who craves connection, even if it comes in unconventional forms.

"We're all shaped by our experiences," I say finally. "What happened to you was monstrous. It doesn't make you a monster."

"Doesn't it?" He pulls away, standing, his naked body tense with barely contained emotion. "I watched you for years, Iris. Painted you without your knowledge. Manipulated your life to bring you here. Those aren't the actions of a healthy man."

I follow him, standing so we're face to face.

"No, they're the actions of someone who never learned how to connect normally.

Someone who found beauty and didn't know how to approach it directly.

" I reach up, tracing the scar on his face with gentle fingers.

"Someone who expected rejection because that's all he's ever known. "

He catches my wrist, his grip firm but not painful. "Don't make excuses for me. I know what I am."

"And what's that?" I challenge.

"A beast," he says simply. "Something dark and broken that should stay isolated."

The word hits me differently than he intends. Not as self-loathing, but as acceptance. A reclaiming of the whispered nickname I've heard around the estate.

"Beast," I repeat, but not as condemnation. I say it softly, like an endearment. I step closer, pressing my naked body against his. "My Beast."

His breath catches, eyes widening in surprise. "Iris?—"

"You think I don't see the darkness in you?" I continue, emboldened by his reaction. "I do. I've seen it in your paintings, felt it in your touch, heard it in your voice when you say I'm yours. And it doesn't frighten me."

"It should," he growls, but his hands betray him, sliding around my waist, pulling me closer.

"Maybe." I rise on tiptoes, lips brushing the underside of his jaw. "But it doesn't. It calls to something in me instead. Something that wants to be claimed, possessed, seen completely."

His arms tighten around me, and I can feel his heartbeat accelerating against my chest. "You can't fix me, Iris."

"I don't want to fix you." I pull back enough to meet his eyes.

"I want to know you. All of you. The artist and the beast. The gentleness and the darkness.

" I touch his face again, this time letting my fingers trace the scar without hesitation.

"I want the man who paints me like I'm precious and fucks me like he wants to consume me. "

A shudder runs through him at my words, his eyes darkening with heat and something more complex—vulnerability, hope, disbelief.

"Let me see you," I whisper. "The way you've seen me."

I don't wait for permission. I lower my mouth to his chest, finding a thin white scar near his collarbone, and press my lips against it. He freezes, his entire body going rigid beneath my touch. I move to another scar, then another, kissing each one with deliberate tenderness.

"Iris," he says, my name sounding like it's being torn from him. "You don't have to?—"

"I know." I continue my path down his body, kneeling to reach the scars on his abdomen, his hip. "I want to."

As I work my way across his torso, his breathing becomes irregular, his hands hovering uncertainly before settling in my hair, not guiding, just connecting.

When I reach the burn mark on his shoulder, I linger there, looking up to find his eyes watching me with such naked emotion it steals my breath.

"Turn around," I say softly.

He hesitates, then complies, presenting his back to me—the area he's been most reluctant to show. The damage here is worse, a lattice of old wounds layered atop each other. I press my lips to the centermost one, feeling him tremble beneath my touch.

"Beautiful," I murmur against his skin. "You're beautiful, Guy."

A sound escapes him—not quite a sob, but close. His shoulders hunch, head dropping forward as I continue pressing kisses to each mark, each memory of pain. When I've covered every scar I can reach, I wrap my arms around him from behind, pressing my cheek between his shoulder blades, holding him.

The trembling intensifies, and I realize with a shock that he's crying—silent, contained, but unmistakably crying. His hands cover mine where they rest on his stomach, holding on like I'm the only solid thing in a world gone liquid with emotion.

"Beast," I whisper, the name tender on my tongue. "My Beast."

He turns in my arms, face wet with tears he's probably never allowed himself to shed. There's no artifice now, no careful control, no walls. Just a man—damaged, complicated, but achingly human—looking at me like I've performed some miracle simply by seeing him and not turning away.

"Iris," he says, my name a benediction. Then, so quietly I almost miss it: "Yours."

He sinks to his knees before me, pressing his face against my stomach, arms wrapping around my hips. Not sexual, but supplicating. Surrendering. I cradle his head against me, fingers gentle in his hair, letting him release whatever has been locked inside him for so long.

We stay like that as morning light strengthens around us, bathing us gold—the artist on his knees, the muse standing guard over him. Both of us scarred in different ways, both seeking something in the other that we haven't found elsewhere.

Understanding, perhaps. Acceptance. The freedom that comes from being truly seen and embraced anyway.

When he finally looks up at me, his eyes are clearer than I've ever seen them, the perpetual storm in them temporarily calmed.

"No one has ever..." he starts, then shakes his head, unable to complete the thought.

"I know," I say, because I do. No one has ever touched his scars with tenderness. No one has ever looked at his darkness and called it beautiful. No one has ever embraced the beast and the man as one complete being.

Until me. Until now.

He rises, gathering me in his arms, and carries me back to the daybed. We don't speak as he lays me down, as he covers my body with his, as he enters me with a gentleness that makes tears spring to my own eyes. This joining is different from the others—not claiming or consuming, but connecting.

For the first time, I feel like we're truly seeing each other, past the obsession and the fear, into something deeper and more true. Something that might, against all odds, heal us both.