Wanting is how I become the monster they all think I am.
I slam my fist into the wall and welcome the pain, the crunch of stone, the bright sharp clarity it brings.
It doesn't help.
Nothing helps.
She's here now. In my fortress. Under my protection. Sleeping thirty feet away with nothing but walls and a door between us.
Mine.
And I'm already damned.
The curse purrs its agreement, sinking deeper into my bones, patient as death.
Thirty days, the oath says.
We'll see.
THE BEAST'S HOUSE
Annora's POV
I wakeup in clean sheets.
For a moment, I just lie there, staring at rough-hewn beams overhead, trying to remember the last time I slept in an actual bed. Not a pile of straw in the healer's loft above the apothecary. Not the cold stone floor of a cell where they kept me after the branding.
A bed.
With blankets that smell like lavender and pine, soft against skin that's forgotten softness.
This has to be a trick. Some kind of trap.
I sit up slowly, half-expecting the door to burst open. Half-expecting yesterday to dissolve into fever dream: the auction, the beast-lord catching me, the ride through darkness to this fortress that feels like the edge of the world.
But no. Pale morning light slants through the narrow window. My borrowed dress—that scrap of ceremonial linen—lies discarded on the floor where I stepped out of it last night, and I'm wearing... a nightshift. Clean. Soft.
I don't remember changing.
The thought makes my skin crawl. Who dressed me? When?
But then I notice the nightshift is draped over the footboard when I fell asleep, and I have a vague memory of pulling it on in the dark, too exhausted to care about anything except not being naked.
Right. I did that.
I touch my neck carefully. The blood-collar is still there, cold metal against skin that's raw and tender.
Of course it is.
A sharp knock at the door makes me flinch hard enough that my pulse spikes. The collar warms—not burning, but warning.
Obey. Be still. Don't react.
"Decent?" A woman's voice—gruff, no-nonsense, edged in impatience.
"I—yes?"
The door swings open and a woman built like a war-axe strides in, carrying a wooden tray. She's older, maybe fifty, with steel-gray hair braided back in a crown and the kind of face that's seen everything twice and wasn't impressed either time. Scars mark her hands. Old burns, I think. Kitchen work or—
