Page 28 of Beautiful Beast

I knew enough to know what he meant, in spite of everyone’s attempts to keep me blind. And stars knew I wanted all of it and more. But I could not speak the word until I knew what they planned for me.

Endre groaned, pinning my body to the wall with his, face dropping between my head and shoulder. “What the fuck is it about you?” The words were murmured into my skin.

All at once he dropped my hands, pulling back to stare at me with a creature’s smoothness. Gold eyes shone through, vertical pupils so unlike the human ones. And they were beautiful.

He blinked, and they were gone, his human eyes replacing them, and the presence of his dragon no longer here. But they weren’t different entities. I felt that much. It was bigger and wilder. Less concerned with rules and consequences. Dangerous. Alluring.

With a heaving breath, he stepped away from me, releasing me entirely. He stared at me, nearly haunted, before backing away more and putting distance between us. He glanced at the knife on the floor and chose to leave it there with a flicker of a smile. “Not what I expected.”

I rushed to the door when he stepped through it, but it was closed and locked by the time I made it to him. “I thought you had no more honor.”

Endre stared at me for a long time, though I did not think it was me he saw. “What tatters of it remain will hold for one more day.”

Then he was gone, striding into the shadows without looking back.

Energy poured out of my body like I’d been plunged into a freezing ocean. I barely made it back to the bed before my knees collapsed, unable to hold me after the intensity of… whatever the stars that had been.

Varí crawled out from beneath the blanket, looking at me carefully. I was glad he hadn’t been seen yet. “That was strange,” I told him.

Like he agreed, Varí chirped. But he also turned back to the wall and curled up, silently telling me there was more sleep to be had and we should rest. But even as I laid down and curled around him, I didn’t know if I would be able to sleep.

Like a phantom, I still felt golden eyes watching me, deciding which way a dragon’s honor would break.

CHAPTER TWELVE

________

KATALENA

Scraping woke me.

I startled, bolting straight up in the cell’s bed. Somehow I fell asleep, though I didn’t remember doing so. A woman stood in my cell. Or rather, she held the plate of food I hadn’t eaten and my discarded blade and was swiftly retreating.

She looked… afraid.

“Wait, please.”

The woman did not.

“You must forgive Fora. She has not mastered the art of speech in her human form.”

In the shadows of the hallway, another woman stood. She might have been a member of my father’s court the way she dressed. Her golden hair was perfectly styled, and she might have been my mother’s age had she lived. Golden hair. Shining, not like a human. Beautiful, and entirely out of place in this place of bare rock.

“Who are you?”

She smiled. “I am Erryn. I have come to take you to bathe and provide you with clothes that are not torn, if that is something you wish.”

“So they are not going to kill me?”

A softer smile. “I could not say. But while you live, we do not hold that prisoners must live in discomfort.”

After being flown across the continent, I was in desperate need of a bath. “I would like that, thank you.”

With my legs still beneath the blankets, Varí crawled and slid beneath my skirt so he could cling to and accompany me. I didn’t think my shift would conceal him nearly as well as the wedding dress, but I wasn’t going to leave him behind in case it was not this cell I returned to.

When he clung to my undergarments once more, I stood. He was small enough that the shift concealed him. Mostly. If Erryn noticed him, she said nothing.

She didn’t wait, striding down the tall, broad hallway I’d been flown through. Was I allowed to see this?

---