Page 155 of Beau and the Beast

Beau moved to the corner where he’d set up his typewriter and stacks of papers.

“How much do you want?” he asked. “I have several chapters that are already polished—just need to be re-typed or put into a word processor or whatever. I could give you more, but I only have this one hard copy to work with right now.”

“How long is it?”

“Ten chapters,” Beau said. “One for every year of the curse. The only one that doesn’t have a clean first draft done is the last one.”

“Just a few chapters, if you don’t mind,” Violet said. “I read slowly.”

He nodded and organized the papers. Though he’d pored over every word of the first few chapters, it still felt odd to hand it over to someone else.

Would Violet find the book sappy? Overwrought?

Beau had taken such pleasure in deviating from his normal prose, the simple words of a journalist. But maybe he had gone too far—made it too flowery. Would the curse be broken if the book was so bad nobody even wanted to read it.

He hugged the pages to his body as he walked them back to Violet.

“I feel insecure as hell right now,” he admitted, laughing. “If you think it’s awful, you have to promise to tell me. I’m sure I can salvage it somehow.”

She shook her head and held out her hands. “Beau, I’m sure it’s fine.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Beau gave her the stack of papers.

* * *

Violet returnedto her room instead of her office once Beau handed over the manuscript.

The office seemed like the wrong place to experience it. The office was for non-profit work, for company business. But this—Beau’s book—was different.

This was their key to freedom. To saving Wolfram.

He’d handed her a hundred or more pages, covered with marks where he’d done revisions to his first draft—and it had looked like he held back twice as many pages as he handed over. Truly, he must be closing in on the end of the project. That much was a relief, at least.

She opened to the first page.

Isidore Bellamy Wolfram, Jr., is seven feet tall with the horns of a ram, the tail of a lion, and fangs that I don’t immediately recognize as belonging to any specific wild beast.

Despite this, Isidore Bellamy Wolfram, Jr., is undoubtedly a man.

Violet stopped. She’d always assumed that Beau would be writing a book about Wolfram as a man—not revealing the curse and what it had done to him.

No one in their right mind is going to believe any of this, she thought in a panic.

She punched down the first reaction. Maybe Beau pulled it off. Maybe, against all odds, the book would still be able to break the curse.

But mercy for the man with none

he still can be released:

ten years time to find the light,

for beauty frees the beast.

Maybe, she reasoned, the light meant full disclosure of what had happened. And if Beau was the key to freeing Wolfram and the rest of them, maybe he was imbued with some sort of understanding that she didn’t have.

You’re reaching,she chided herself. But stranger things had happened.

She flipped to a random passage.

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