Page 46 of Beau and the Beast

But even as he spoke, he knew it was true. For better or worse, there wasn’t a meek bone in Beau’s body and he wasn’t about to stop questioning Wolfram just because the man had started pouting. Let him roar at Beau and scratch up his drapes like a disobedient housecat—Beau was there to tell his story, not bend to his will.

"Oh, Jesus, you brought up hisdad?" Song asked.

"He's writing Wolfram's biography," Violet said, cutting in. "Of course he's going to ask about his parents."

Song held up his hands in surrender. "Hey, I'm not criticizing. So much for breaking the curse, though."

Violet rolled her eyes.

"I still believe in you, Beau, for what it's worth," she said.

"Me too," James said.

They looked around the table, waiting for endorsements from the others but none came. Song, Alfie, and Geoffrey exchanged heavy glances in between bites of lasagna.

"Can I ask you more about the curse?" Beau asked, more than ready to change the subject.

"Yeah, why not," Geoffrey said, hitching a shoulder.

"What are the... parameters of it? Do you have to stay in the penthouse because it's just impossible for you to leave, or can you not get a certain distance away from Wolfram, or what?"

"We could leave," Alfie said, dropping his eyes. "If we didn't value our heartbeats."

They told him the story of the sixth member of the staff, the one Beau had never met. They told him about headstrong Ryan who had been too foolish to believe in magic, in curses, to believe that the pain he felt in his chest when he stepped outside the doors of the penthouse was something real—that could harm him.

That, in the end, would kill him.

"That's terrible," Beau said in earnest. "I can't imagine how devastating that must have been to lose him and how frightening it was to realize there was no way for you to leave. I'm so sorry."

"Ryan was a prick," Geoffrey said, spearing a bite of pasta on his plate, "and I miss the hell out of him."

"Hear, hear," James said.

"To Ryan," Beau said, lifting up his glass of wine.

Slow smiles made their way around the table, and after a moment, all of them were lifting their glasses to touch them to Beau's.

"To Ryan," Violet echoed, "and to breaking this fucking curse."

Chapter Nine

After Beau awokefor the third time in the penthouse, he wondered which Wolfram would be waiting for him that day—the kind gentleman who politely served him tea or the one who had raged against him and left him so abruptly, making Beau feel like a foolish child.

He got ready for his day, bathing with the toiletries that Violet had left in his room during his session the day before. She'd filled the big carved wardrobe in his new bedroom with fine, expensive clothes and it felt like the garments had appeared magically. He'd never had anyone shop for him before, and it was rare for Noah and Beau to have enough money between them to buy anything that wasn’t secondhand.

With a towel slung around his hips, he looked through the different things that she'd hung up there for him.

The clothes were far finer than any he owned outright.

It felt strange—wrong somehow—to accept the generosity. It felt like by putting on the clothes, he'd be trying to pretend to be someone else. Beau sighed and returned to the bed where he'd laid out the clothes he'd arrived in, trying to smooth out their wrinkles so that it wasn't so obvious he'd worn them several days in a row.

He bent over, lowering his face to the sweater.

It still passed the sniff test.

Maybe he could get a few more days out of the outfit. Maybe he could hold onto this last piece of the outside world, the strange comfort it brought him.

He was more comfortable in his own clothes.

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