Page 17 of The Beast's Hidden Rose
"Guy," I say, resting my hand on his chest, over his heart. "Please."
A long silence stretches between us. Just when I think he won't answer, he speaks, his voice distant, as if coming from somewhere deep underwater.
"My father believed pain was instructive." His eyes fix on some point beyond my shoulder. "When I showed interest in art instead of the family business, he decided I needed... instruction."
My heart constricts. "He hurt you."
"The face," he touches the long scar on his cheek, "was from a broken bottle. I was sixteen, had just been accepted to art school. He said if I wanted to be an artist so badly, he'd give me something interesting to paint." His laugh is hollow, empty of humor. "The back was a belt, over years. The burn," he indicates his shoulder, "cigarette, when I was caught sketching instead of doing homework."
I feel sick, imagining a younger Guy enduring such cruelty. "And your mother?"
"Left when I was four. Couldn't handle him either." He shrugs, a movement trying for casual but achieving only rigid control. "He died ten years ago. Car accident. Poetic justice, I suppose, since the worst of these," he gestures to his face, "came from the car accident I was in at nineteen. His drunk driving. The only time his 'lessons' affected him too."
The clinical way he recites these horrors makes them worse somehow. Like he's talking about someone else's life, not the systematic abuse that shaped him.
"You survived," I say, finding his hand, squeezing it. "You built this life for yourself, became an artist despite him."
"I survived," he agrees. "But not unchanged. What happened... it twisted something in me. The need to control my environment, to isolate myself. The way I fixate, obsess." His eyes find mine, suddenly intense. "The way I watched you for years without approaching. Normal people don't do that, Iris."
"Normal is overrated," I echo his words from earlier. "And who gets to decide what's normal anyway?"
"Society. Laws. Basic human decency." His mouth twists. "All the boundaries I've crossed with you."
I consider this, turning over his confession in my mind. What he's done—the watching, the painting without consent, the manipulation to bring me here—it should repel me. Would repel most people. Yet here I am, naked in his bed, seeking to understand rather than judge.
What does that say about me?
Perhaps that I'm just as broken in my own way. That my history of feeling invisible, unimportant, has made the intensity of his focus feel like salvation rather than threat. That I too have been shaped by my past into someone who craves connection, even if it comes in unconventional forms.
"We're all shaped by our experiences," I say finally. "What happened to you was monstrous. It doesn't make you a monster."
"Doesn't it?" He pulls away, standing, his naked body tense with barely contained emotion. "I watched you for years, Iris. Painted you without your knowledge. Manipulated your life to bring you here. Those aren't the actions of a healthy man."
I follow him, standing so we're face to face. "No, they're the actions of someone who never learned how to connect normally. Someone who found beauty and didn't know how to approach it directly." I reach up, tracing the scar on his face with gentle fingers. "Someone who expected rejection because that's all he's ever known."
He catches my wrist, his grip firm but not painful. "Don't make excuses for me. I know what I am."
"And what's that?" I challenge.
"A beast," he says simply. "Something dark and broken that should stay isolated."
The word hits me differently than he intends. Not as self-loathing, but as acceptance. A reclaiming of the whispered nickname I've heard around the estate.
"Beast," I repeat, but not as condemnation. I say it softly, like an endearment. I step closer, pressing my naked body against his. "My Beast."
His breath catches, eyes widening in surprise. "Iris?—"
"You think I don't see the darkness in you?" I continue, emboldened by his reaction. "I do. I've seen it in your paintings, felt it in your touch, heard it in your voice when you say I'm yours. And it doesn't frighten me."
"It should," he growls, but his hands betray him, sliding around my waist, pulling me closer.
"Maybe." I rise on tiptoes, lips brushing the underside of his jaw. "But it doesn't. It calls to something in me instead. Something that wants to be claimed, possessed, seen completely."
His arms tighten around me, and I can feel his heartbeat accelerating against my chest. "You can't fix me, Iris."
"I don't want to fix you." I pull back enough to meet his eyes. "I want to know you. All of you. The artist and the beast. The gentleness and the darkness." I touch his face again, this time letting my fingers trace the scar without hesitation. "I want the man who paints me like I'm precious and fucks me like he wants to consume me."
A shudder runs through him at my words, his eyes darkening with heat and something more complex—vulnerability, hope, disbelief.
