Page 14 of Beau and the Beast

It seemed to hit Geoffrey and Song at the same time.

"You think he has something to do with it?" Geoffrey asked. “The witch’s poem?”

"What?" Alfie said, standing up finally. "I don't get it. Do you guys know this kid?"

"No, Alfie," Song said slowly. "Beauty frees the beast. Beau. Beauty."

"That's a stretch, don't you think?"

"Everything we've done for the past ten years is a fucking stretch," Violet pointed out. "Magical goddamn curses are astretch."

Slowly, everyone in the staff began to nod.

They knew she was right.

"We can’t let him leave," she said, barely believing that she was saying the words out loud. "He might be our ticket out of here."

Chapter Four

When Beau came to, he was at first aware of the way that his arms ached.

He moved to pull them to the front of his body, to try and massage the weary muscles there—but as soon as he went to move, he realized he was bound.

He could hear unfamiliar voices.

He opened his eyes. He was inside one of the condos.The penthouse, of course.

Beau's arms were lashed behind his back, wrist to wrist and then tied to a high-back chair.

He'd been ambushed. Someone had held something that stank over his mouth and nose until he'd passed out, but as he did a mental inventory of his body, he realized that he wasn't hurt. They'd knocked him out, dragged him somewhere, and then bound him to a chair.

"He's definitely some kind of writer," someone said. It was a woman's voice. “Did you see the notebook?”

Beau craned his neck to try and find the source of the sound but couldn't see anyone. He did, however, take note of his surroundings. The room he was in was just as devastatingly beautiful and austere as the downstairs lobby had been. It looked like a living room, maybe, or a formal sitting room with the same rock walls as below. Someone had lit a fire against the odd spring chill of the evening and it roared across the room like something living.

"How's a writer going to help Wolfram?" someone else asked. A man this time.

God, how many of them are there?

Wolfram... the name sounded familiar. He tried to search his foggy memory. Had Beau written a story about him for The New Whitby Ledger? Or was this a name he'd heard tossed around the newsroom?

Wolfram.... Isabelle?

There was a first name bouncing around in there somewhere. Isabelle Wolfram? Isabella? It seemed correct on his tongue, but he couldn't quite shape the name and understand where in his memory it had come from.

"Light can lift his shadowed soul,'" another man said in the distance. "Maybe light' wasn't enlightenment like the boss thought. Maybe the riddle was talking about shedding light onhim."

"What, writing about Wolfram?"

"Yeah. Like... a memoir or biography or whatever," the man said. "I don't know—I'm just spitballing here."

"There's no way the name is a coincidence," the same woman said from before. "The kid is involved somehow."

“So, what, we hire him to write a book? This is insane.”

As the voices continued, Beau looked for a way to escape. What the hell did they think he was involved in? He didn't even know who Wolfram was. He couldn't have been involved if hewantedto.

Beau struggled against his bindings, wondering if he could knock the chair over, break it, and walk right out. He didn't see the money anywhere now and it felt like they'd emptied his pockets—but money be damned. He just wanted to make it out of the penthouse alive.

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