Beloved Beast

Chapter Forty-Nine

A small, breathless sound escaped her, and fuck, if he did not feel it to his very core. As faint as it was, it was enough to draw his heated focus to her sweet mouth. The visceral urge to kiss those rosette lips overriding every single thought as his pulse quickened with longing.

Elle had grown quiet, and Don wondered if his open declaration of love had stunned her. It served neither one of them to suppress his feelings and he had a glimmer of hope that he had not lost her. That she could still love him.

Everything he felt about her, every raw, burning feeling that circulated his mishandled heart, came to him as naturally as the air he breathed, and yet, it was those said intense feelings that stripped his soul bare, rendering him soft to the world.

Before Elle, he balked at the idea of unconditional love. Love was a vulnerability his cold, sequestered heart was disinclined to invest in. It was a pleasure in life he felt he had no right indulging given the reprehensible sins against him, and the iron-clad curse that shackled him to disfigurements and shadows.

Don saw what eternal love had done to his mother after his father had died. Freya Rossetti had withdrawn from the world, shrinking to a shell of herself. She had doted on him, of course, as any loving mother would do, but her grief had been enormous. It had stunted her fondness for life, and it made her easy prey for Seraphine, the woman he had trusted and invited into their lives. The mage using every enticing incentive to lure his fragile mother into her deadly trap. Freya had no reason to not trust Seraphine. This was the woman whom he had been courting, the love of his life whom he had pledged his heart and loyalty to, but like his guileless mother, he too had been susceptible to her deceptive charm.

When his father had died, he too had become emotionally numb to the world. Keeping his mother at arm's length. Loving her deeply, but from afar. When he met Seraphine, he had fallen hard and fast for her honeyed words and golden beauty, believing their love to be honest and true, much like the one that had sheltered and nurtured him.

Don couldn't have been more wrong, but when life granted you a second chance at love, one that was pure, honest, and forgiving, transcending the damaging commitment that came before, it reminded him that love could still fundamentally be selfless and true, and he would not waste another second on punitive feelings of unworthiness and self-contempt.

After two decades of loneliness and isolation, of self-deprecation and forcing relations and intimacy at bay, he had come to realize that a life without love was a life not worth knowing.

Elle had taught him that.

He would always have his regrets, but the risk of baring his heart was worth the reward of loving her for a lifetime.

Despite Seraphine's infernal curse, he had never felt more alive, more at peace than when he gazed into her warm gold-tinted eyes. Like an early sunrise to his midnight hour. Like the winking stars to his pining, black sky, he was nothing without Elle. What he felt for her could not be summed up in two words or less. It was complicated and all-consuming; it was obsessive and possessive. An unstoppable, selfish force that even if he had the willpower to fight, he wouldn't.

That moment on the cliff, when she had laid unresponsive in his arms, when the light had faded from her dark, beautiful eyes, had single-handedly been the most horrifying, devastating moment of his life. Next to losing his mother, losing Elle to his enemy was the ultimate blow, and a tragedy with which he could not harmonize. The despair and grief he had felt as he held her lifeless body in his arms, choking on the harsh reality that he hadn't saved her, had been indescribable. The pain and guilt so unbelievable, it had overshadowed every heartbreak and grievous misfortune that had shaped his entire life.