Page 55 of Cursed Beasts

She looked and smelled it before she drank it, making a face when she swallowed.

“You have a few cuts that I can clean and see if they need stitches. I think you also have a few broken ribs but those will just take time to heal, nothing extraneous in the next few weeks.” He was starting to look upset as he looked at different parts of her body. “Especially not leaving your room in the middle of the night.”

“I didn’t leave my room, I'm not that stupid. I just— I just—” She looked away out the double window. “I fell asleep. Then, the next thing I heard was a growl.”

Mr. Potter’s face softened while he applied some salve on a few cuts and some on her face.

“You didn’t sleep much the night before, looking through those books,” he chided her. “Here take this, you need to catch up on your sleep and I’ll come back in a few hours to bring you food.”

She stared at the vial.

“I don’t—”

“Drink up, no excuses,” he said, packing his things.

She stared at him with annoyance, but her face softened before she took the medicine.

“Thank you, get some rest,” he kissed her forehead before he walked over to me motioning for me to follow him.

I glanced back to see Katarina wincing as she laid down. When she noticed I was staring, she gave me a small smile.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

I nodded before I left the room.

My body was starting to feel better with the pain medicine doing its job.

“How are you feeling?” Mr. Potter asked, as we made our way to the dining room.

“Better,” I said, when he pushed me down to sit on a chair.

He inspected me, running his hands over me, making me shiver from the strange sensation his non-corporeal fingers left.

“Do you really think it was her who drew your consciousness into your wolf form?” he asked, as he assessed my arm, which was in the most pain. The sound of bones breaking from the force of Lucien's jaw echoed through my memory.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It was jarring how quickly I came into consciousness. We were pressed up against each other. Her heart was beating frantically while there was the smell of her fear in the air.”

Mr. Potter's face was furrowed in concentration.

I yelled when Mr. Potter snapped a bone back into place.

“Some warning would have been nice,” I said, when I pulled my arm back.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, grabbing my arm to inspect it. “I’m glad you tried to save her. She might be the Belladonna, we need to break this spell and Zev isn’t making the situation any better. She also needs better accommodations than you have put her in. I don’t know why I agreed to that horrendous room.”

As much as I wanted to be hopeful for that outcome, I couldn’t let myself believe in her. We were here because of her ancestors, what would make her different?

“I'm going to tell you the same thing I told Zev,” he said, stepping back. “Don’t let your stubbornness or hatred keep us here.”

He disappeared before I could say anything else to him. If I was stubborn, Zev was a mountain with no way to move him.

He was the one who was hurt most from this curse. She betrayed all of us, but she broke Zev’s heart in doing so, and I was never going to forget that a Belladonna was the reason we were here. I couldn’t let another Belladonna do more damage to our already fragile family.

25

KATARINA

The sound of glass breaking, the sense of free falling and unbearable pain jerked me awake. I sat up in bed, wincing from the pain in my shoulder as I cursed in every language I could think of.

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