Page 46 of The Beast & His Beauty

“Don’t call me that,” he orders, his voice sharp.

With my heart racing and my mind not understanding, I blink at the change in tone. He has ordered me to do many things, but this is the first time I have heard him speak to me in such pained anger.

“Is there something else I should call you?”

He narrows his eyes. “Call me what I am.”

“You are a prince.”

I’m only stating what is true. For most of my life, I believed the stories the villagers said about the beast. That he was a beast who was once a man but was cursed by a witch and turned into a creature like the world had never seen before. A dangerous creature who would kill anyone who tried to get a glimpse of him. And yet, here he is before me.

Those are just stories, as I have learned. The man before me is not a creature unlike any I have ever seen. The stories said that he was most like a wolf, but far too large to be defeated. That, too, was just a story. The man standing in the middle of my room, his hands at his sides and his face flushed from his anger, is a man.

Flesh like mine.

I have seen many men before, but I have never seen one as handsome as the prince.

The prince stares at me, his eyes sharp and his shoulders rising and falling as he breathes. Anger rises in him and though the magic in the castle tries, it cannot soothe the tension between us now.

“I’m not a prince,” he growls, then strides across the room to the mirror. He jerks it on a sharp angle, the heavy weight of it nothing to him. “Look.”

Has he gone mad? Can he not see himself for who he is?

“I am looking.” I dare to speak the truth, my words barely able to be spoken. I swallow thickly. “I have seen you.” I glance in the mirror, but his reflection is just the same as the man I see standing in the room. There is nothing different about it. “You are a man and a prince. And I have seen you as the beast as well.” My heart races, the temperature in the room rising with the fear within me.

He looks into the mirror, a faint hope crossing his face and then falling away. Whatever he sees makes him bare his teeth and snarl at his reflection. I grip the sheets tighter, startled by his reaction.

“I am a beast!”

“You aren’t.” I get out of the bed, ignoring how tired my legs remain and cross to him, taking his hand in mine. He lets me do it, but he trembles with suppressed emotion. “You are a man. When I look at you, and when I look into the mirror, I see the same thing. A tall man, handsome, with?—”

“Don’t lie to me,” he practically sneers and drops my hand.

With a step back, I move away from him, my body instinctively taking me away from danger.

I do not want him to think I am afraid of him, but I also do not want him to think I’m lying. He doesn’t see what I see. How is that possible? I can see him clearly when I look at him, and his reflection is just as clear in the mirror.

The beast, who still looks every bit the prince, bares his teeth at me and lets out a growl of pure anger and pain. My heart drops, then begins to beat so intensely that I cannot breathe as I watch him change before my eyes. It takes me a few moments to realize what I’m feeling.

This is the first time I’ve been terrified of the beast. With both my hands raised, I whisper, “Please don’t hurt me.” And with shock and regret in his gaze, he runs from the room, more a beast than a man.

THE PRINCE AND THE BEAST

In the tower, I sit before the rose and stare at it, practically unseeing, for too long before I manage to shake myself out of my thoughts and admit what sits before me.

The rose is nearly bare. Almost every petal has fallen from the stem, and they lay on the bottom of the cloche in a soft pile that would be nothing if it was not counting down the days I have left.

I close my eyes and hope for it to be different when I open them.

I heave myself out of the seat with a growl, my frustrations like a fire inside me. There’s a mirror on one wall. It has been on the wall since before the curse, but I have long since stopped looking at it. What does it have to tell me? Nothing but to remind me that I am a beast. The rose was the only thing that mattered in this room.

In the mirror, I am unchanged. I am the frightening predator who stalks the woods, who tears at throats and roars in the night. My gaze drops to my hands, and the carved claws and brown fur are still there. Never leaving. How could she look at this and call me the prince?

“Nothing but the beast,” I whisper.

“That is not what I see.”

Elle’s voice startles me, and I turn from the mirror to find her standing in the doorway to the tower room. She must have climbed to the room with soft footsteps, because I did not hear her approach.