I could already sense the old Beast brimming under the surface, waiting to come out and lash out at the world again, but I wasn’t ready for that man right now.
“Well, Beast,” I sighed dramatically, “like it or not, youarea sick patient,” I teased.
“Fuck you,” he growled with a hard scowl.
I wagged my finger at him playfully. “Tut tut, that’s no way to speak to your nurse, now, is it? Now be a good boy and sit still so I can check that you’re not about to pass out or anything.”
He almost choked on a laugh, his scowl falling away as easily as it had come. “A good boy? You’re pushing your luck, Belle,” he warned, his expression curious.
My stomach fluttered and I fought to keep the smile from my face.
Over the past few weeks, I had met many versions of Beast. From the angry and enraged, to the pained. To the ignorant and downright sexist to the horny. But this Beast was different from all of those, and he might just be my favorite of them all. Beast and I were two very different people from very different backgrounds, as far as I could tell. We had nothing in common so small talk had been awkward between us. But I had a feeling that underneath the hard-man image he liked to portray, that maybe there was someone softer there. Maybe in a different life I would have gotten to meet that version of him properly.
I continued to check the machines, ignoring his warning, and I watched him from the corner of my eye shake his head and look back out at the view in front of the hospital. We both lapsed back into comfortable silence—him, sitting in a hospital wheelchair, dressed in a hospital gown and bandages, and me, standing next to him in my ugly nurse’s uniform. We looked out in silence, both of us comfortable in each other’s presence for once, where usually we both walked on eggshells with one another.
I wanted to say something to make him feel better. To let him know that it would all be okay. That he’d get better and things would be different. But that wasn’t true and I knew he wouldn’t appreciate the lie. He would get better, but he would never be the man he used to be.
So much of him was scarred—from blades or by fire, it didn’t matter. Whoever had done this had destroyed his body, carving into it like he was a log of wood. Some cuts had been so deep and had gotten so infected that chunks had been taken out, leaving dips in his muscle. His left arm bore the scars of fire, from shoulder to fingertips. And what wasn’t burned on his body or carved from a knife had been broken. I’d overheard Doctor Collins say he didn’t understand how Beast was still alive, and honestly, when I looked through his file, I couldn’t understand it either.
There was no other way to put it: Beast should be dead.
I watched his expression as he looked out at the world, and I saw on his face that he knew he should be dead too. In fact, the more I looked, the more I saw that the only reason he was still alive was because he wanted to get revenge for what had been done. And what then, I wondered. Would he give up? Would he finally lay down and die? Would he finally have the peace that he sought? I wanted him to have peace—Lord knows that after what he’d been through, he deserved it—but I didn’t want him dead.
“Grew up around here,” he said, his gravelly voice breaking into my thoughts. I looked down at him but he was still staring off into the distance. “As a kid, all I could think about was getting away. Now I think I’ll never escape this place.”
He sounded so sad, and his pain cut into me deeper than any of those knives ever could. I reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder again and he looked up at me sternly.
“Don’t need or want your sympathy, Belle,” he grunted.
“Good, because I’m not giving it.” I looked away. “I only give sympathy to those that are sorry for what they’ve done in their life, and you’re not that man, are you, Beast?” I looked back down at him, watching as his brow furrowed deeper, his expression darkening.
“Ain’t nothing to apologize for,” he snarled.
I removed my hand with a shake of my head, feeling stupid for ever thinking that he could be anything but this beast of a man. I knew what he’d done. I’d heard a lot of stories in the past few weeks about the Devil’s Highwaymen and the men that rode with them. I knew far more about him than I wanted to, and maybe he was right—maybe he didn’t have anything to apologize for. But if I felt I could have asked it of him, I would have asked him to apologize anyway. People made mistakes. And people made decisions on the hand they were given. That was all he had done. He’d made a choice when he’d joined the Devil’s Highwaymen, and he’d become the man he needed to to survive. Only now it had caught up with him, almost destroying him in the process.
“Probably best to go back before someone notices,” I said, turning to call for Joey.
Beast reached out and grabbed my hand, and I looked back down at him. He stared up at me with his stormy gray eye full of every emotion a man could ever have: regret and guilt, shame and anger, love and hate. They all swam inside him, but his face remained impassive and closed off to me and to everyone else.
“You don’t understand; I need to make them pay, Belle.”
Was he asking for my permission? My acceptance? I frowned, not certain of anything anymore. Whenever I was around Beast, the world got turned on its head and left became right and up became down. Yet looking into his face right then, I wanted to understand him so much.
“It won’t solve anything. It won’t take anything away,” I replied.
Beast swallowed. “It might take away some of the guilt.”
He looked so vulnerable and lost in that moment that all I could think about doing was holding him—just climbing onto his lap and wrapping my arms around him. So I did. I sat on his lap and wrapped my arms around him, holding him as close as I could. Feeling his heart beating in his chest and his breath on my neck, and then his arms as they wrapped around me and pulled me closer. I breathed him in, every dark and awful thing that he’d done, and I tried to take his pain from him, to let him know that I cared, that I wanted better for him, that he’d get through this. I held Beast like he needed to be loved, and maybe he did, because he held me back just as tightly.
His hand moved to my hair, his fingers threading through the soft waves as he sighed. He pulled my face back from him so he could look into my eyes.
“What’s happening, Belle?” he asked, searching my face for answers. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” I said quietly.
“Was that it then? Back there, was that just a taste of the darkness before you go back to someone better? Someone good and wholesome?” His words were bitter, venom lacing them.
“Please, Beast, don’t be like that,” I begged. “I don’t know what that was back there. And I don’t know what I want. I don’t understand any of this.”
