Page 20 of Beau and the Beast

"When do I get to meet him?"

"We need to brief him about the contract when he's up," she said. "I think it would be best for you to meet him in the morning."

Beau shook his head. The whole thing was bizarre. He could only imagine what kind of eccentric man Mr. Wolfram must be to keep his entire staff living with him in close quarters in his condo.

Violet opened the door for him and he stepped inside.

Beau was washed with an irrational, animal fear.

Something very wrong had happened inside of the room he was now standing in.

It was clear that the large room had once been well-appointed, hung with lush draperies across the floor-to-ceiling windows and outfitted with sturdy, intricately-carved wood furniture. But everything that had once made the room pleasing now factored into its current disturbing appearance.

It appeared that a large animal had rampaged within the room—and not something like a dog. Something huge and violent.

Beau was struck immediately by images of a roaring tiger or a grizzly, towering on its hind legs. The wooden furniture was broken and strewn around like matchsticks until it was barely recognizable. The seat cushions had been shredded and hung open on their frames, disgorging white stuffing like mangled corpses.

Most frightening, though, was the sight of the stone wall to his left.

Something had made a mark there.In the stone. Four daggers—or claws, Beau realized—had been forced into the stone and then dragged down in an ugly slash.

Beau's heart thudded in his chest and he turned to leave, colliding with Violet.

She surveyed the room behind him and didn't look shocked.

"Goddamnit," she said under her breath. She got out of his way, letting him return to the hallway, before shutting the door behind them.

"What the fuckdidthat?" Beau demanded.

"Don't worry about it," Violet said. She couldn't even meet his eyes, as if she knew that it was the lamest sentence that had ever been uttered.

"I'mdefinitelyworrying about it."

"We'll find you another room," she said quickly, moving across the hallway to an identical door.

He didn’t want to linger outside of the door to the ruined room, but at the same time, the fact that Violet was glossing over it made him even more nervous.

A few steps away, Violet peeked inside the next room. She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief and threw the second door open.

"Much better," she said.

Beau looked inside cautiously.

His muscles had tensed so hard when he walked into the wrecked room that he felt exhausted now, adrenaline still coursing through his system. How could Violet be so nonchalant about things?

That must be it. Whatever it is Noah caught on camera—it must have done that to the room.

He'd almost forgotten about the thing that was at the heart of his reason for coming in the first place. It was easy to be distracted when fifty million dollars were on the line. And everyone had danced around it.

Beau had been so quick to believe that the thing they'd seen was a person in a costume that he'd never stopped to think about the fact that he might be agreeing to share a penthouse with a very large—and considering the state of the apartment he'd just exited, verydangerous—animal.

Was that Wolfram's secret? That he had some sort of frightening exotic pet? Or was it still what he'd believed in the beginning, some sort of strange costume. Maybe Wolfram got off on dressing up like a mythical beast and trashing his own penthouse.

It seemed unlikely but... Occam's Razor wasn't yielding any solutions that seemedmorelikely.

The second apartment was a mirror image of the first derelict one that Violet had shown him. Beau recognized the same furniture that had been reduced to splinters, the same fabrics that had been shredded to ragged scraps in the room across the hallway.

It was almost more unsettling to see the nice version of the room.

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