Page 40 of The Beast

Izzy had understood.

That was the worst part. The part he couldn’t forgive—not her, not himself. She’d seen him. Really seen him. Not just the artist, but the monster underneath. The darkness he’d learned to leash but had never managed to kill. She’d looked at all of it—the rage, the hunger, the thing inside him that wanted to own and possess and destroy—and she hadn’t run.

She’d loved him anyway.

Or so he’d thought.

He stopped in front of Fractured Light.

Three in the morning. Paint on his fingers. His throat clogged with emotion. Izzy asleep in his bed, her body curled against his pillow.

He’d felt something crack open that night. Something he’d kept locked down his whole life. And instead of terrifying him, it had felt like relief. Like maybe he didn’t have to be the hard, cold thing his father had made him. Like maybe there was another way.

What a fucking fool he’d been.

He wanted to rip the canvas off the wall. Wanted to put his fist through it, just like the brutal creature his brothers had always seen.

He wanted to destroy the evidence that he’d ever let himself be that vulnerable, that naive, that soft.

He didn’t touch it.

Instead, he stood there like a man visiting his own grave, and he let himself feel.

The longing. The loss. The terrible, treacherous wanting that years of hatred couldn’t burn out of him.

He still loved her.

That reality landed hard and cut deep. He just couldn’t fucking shake her off. He’d tried everything. Fought in underground rings until his knuckles were raw and his ribs were cracked—channeling the darkness the old way, the way he’d learned before the canvas.

He’d fucked women who meant nothing, hoping to burn her out of his system. Built an empire of underground clubs that spread across the whole damn country just to prove he didn’t need her.

None of it worked.

How could it when every time he closed his eyes, she was there? Laughing at something he’d said. Tracing the lines of his paintings with reverent fingers. Looking up at him with those eyes that made him believe he could be more than his father’s son.

And now she was here again. Real and breathing and close enough to touch.

And she swore she didn’t do it.

He both wanted and didn’t want to believe her. Hell, he couldn’t believe her. Belief was weakness. Trust, too. And both could get you killed. He’d learned that lesson from Elias Grimm, and it had been proved right in blood and fire. Never would he forget it.

And yet…

I loved you, you son-of-a-bitch. I still do.

The words echoed in his skull, burrowing under his skin like shrapnel he couldn’t dig out.

I mourned you. For five years, I mourned you.

He pressed his forehead against the wall, the cold, hard surface reminding him of what he’d become.

That was the joke, wasn’t it? He hadn’t become anything. He’d just gone back to what he’d always been. The hard, dangerous man his father had raised him to be. The one who took what he wanted and crushed anything that stood in his way.

Once upon a time, Izzy had made him believe he could be something else.

And yet there was Aspen. Where Isabella had reminded him, in the most brutal way, why softness was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

With a sigh, he let his gaze skim across the walls of the gallery.