He climbed up beside me the way he always did. All that mass and heat folding into the space next to mine, the ancient frame groaning its protest.
It started the way it always started with him above me, all that warm, dense fur and the particular weight of him that I’d stopped bracing for and started welcoming. The familiar stretch as he found his way home inside me, his stare dropping to my face with that look he only wore at night. The one that held everything in it. Questions he couldn’t ask and answers I hadn’t found words for.
He moved. Slow at first, deliberate, the way the night version of him approached everything. And then his head dipped down.
I didn’t know what he intended until his tongue found my nipple.
“Oh—” The word came out stripped of everything except pure, unguarded surprise. The texture of his tongue was something I’dlearned in other places, rough and warm and generous, but this was new territory entirely.
He lapped at the stiffened peak with the same thoroughness he brought to everything else. He circled it with slow, heavy strokes that sent a completely different current through my body than I was accustomed to managing at once.
I made a sound I didn’t plan to make. Not the polite sounds I’d learned to produce back in the village when a man wanted to feel accomplished. No, this was something that came from below my ribs and didn’t ask permission before it escaped my mouth. My fingers found the fur behind his ears automatically, pressing there without conscious instruction from my brain.
He took the encouragement for what it was and gave me more of it.
The dual sensation of it built in a way that didn’t follow any pattern I had reference for. His hips found their rhythm, deeper and more purposeful now, and his tongue kept its own separate rhythm against my breast, and the combination was—it was genuinely unfair, is what it was.
How was a person supposed to manage themselves under those conditions? My hips rose to meet him without my permission. The sounds I was making had stopped being embarrassing and started simply being true.
When the orgasm broke through me, it did so with the kind of certainty that left no room for self-consciousness about the noises coming out of my mouth. I clutched his fur, my back lifting from the mattress, and let it take me completely. Wave after wave, every muscle in my body going through its particular interpretation of release. His tongue never stopped moving through any of it, drawing it longer, pulling the pleasure out past where I thought it ended.
I lay there afterward with my eyes at the ceiling and a very specific thought assembling itself in my mind. I was going towant this every night for the rest of my life, and that was probably going to be a problem.
Was it a problem, though?I turned the question over honestly. Could a woman simply decide she was owed this? That her body’s pleasure was a reasonable thing to want and seek and keep? In the village, that kind of thinking would’ve had them building a second drowning cage just for me. Here, in this falling-down castle in the middle of a cursed forest, with a beast who happened to understand my body better than any human man had bothered to try…
Here, it felt less like a problem and more like a fact.
His knot swelled inside me, that now-familiar fullness that locked us together at the deepest point of our joining. I felt him pulse—once, twice, and again, each wave of his release moving through both of us like a tide. His head had dropped beside mine on the pillow, his breath warm and heavy at my temple, and I let my fingers move idly through his fur the way I did in the sitting room by the fire, the gesture carrying the same instinct in both contexts.
We arranged ourselves by unspoken negotiation, the way we’d learned to do, settling into the shape the bed made room for. His arm came over my waist. His heat seeped into my back. The fire in the hearth clicked and settled.
I wasn’t planning to sleep yet. There was still the journal to think about, still Charlotte’s last entry pressing at the back of my mind—the roses had all gone dark—still the unnamed witch standing at the garden’s boundary with her territorial fury and her patience. I had questions that needed answers and answers that would require more questions, and I meant to stay awake long enough to organize them properly.
Instead, I drifted. Just at the edges, just barely. The warmth and the weight and the slow rhythm of his breathing behind me pulled me under in pieces.
The feeling of being watched came before I fully surfaced. An icy chill shivered up my spine almost in warning.
It was different from Beast’s watching, which I had learned to read like weather. This had a coldness to it, a directional chill that raised the fine hairs on my arms even through the warmth of the covers. I opened my eyes and leaned forward.
She stood at the foot of the bed.
A ghost.
Young. My age, perhaps, or close to it. A girl shaped entirely from some pale, translucent light that moved through her like the wind moves through gauze. Her dress was ragged around the edges as if time had been eating at it from the outside in. Her hair floated around her face as if she stood in water she couldn’t feel. And her eyes—
Her eyes had no irises. No whites. Where eyes should have been, there were only two openings onto somewhere else entirely, scenes shifting through their depths like windows being thrown open one after another and never settling. A village at dusk. A forest road. A room with candlelight. A chest with iron bands. They moved too fast to hold, and looking into them felt like trying to catch smoke with both hands.
She wasn’t looking at the room. She was looking at me.
Beast was awake, after I drew breath to scream. The sound that left me was nearly inhuman, panicked.
He came off the bed like something launched, all speed and muscle and the deep territorial roar that I felt in my back teeth, his body putting itself between mine and the foot of the bed in a single motion that left no room for interpretation. His claws raked the floorboards as he charged.
She didn’t run. She simply ceased to be in the room. One moment she stood there with her shifting, sightless eyes fixed on my face, and the next she had passed through the far wall like smoke through a keyhole. There and gone, leaving only the coldwhere she’d been standing and the echo of Beast’s roar bouncing off the stone.
He stood at the wall with his paws planted and his chest heaving, staring at the place she’d vacated as if he could drag her back through sheer force of will.
I sat up in the ruined bed, the covers gathered at my waist, my heart knocking against my ribs with a violence I was attempting to be dignified about.
