Beloved Beast

Chapter Twenty-Two

To open your heart is to be vulnerable.

Elle's words replayed on his engrossed thoughts as he wandered through his keep, his boots beating an undetermined path.

Don knew what it meant to be vulnerable, and just what it had cost him. He knew loss and heartache. He knew betrayal and deception. He knew what it felt to be whole ... and then broken.

Elle was a chink in his iron-clad defenses. She was a weakness he could ill afford, yet when she had divulged her past, he had caught a glimpse of her pain and it had filled him with a deluge of aggression. It had cut deep. And he wanted to right the wrongs done to her. He wanted to take her place and absorb all the grief and humiliation inflicted upon her.

I don't care what you or anyone else says. You like me too, but you're afraid ... you're afraid of weakness.

She was right. He was not willing to be susceptible to weakness.

Clenching his eyes shut, the memory came unbidden.

Sera sidled closer, and with it, a shrill of wind touched upon the trees, rustling the gnarled boughs with an ominous trill.

Her bright cerulean eyes flooded with black and alighted upon his face replete with disdain and rage. The uncanny light reflected in those darkening depths, distorted features he had once regarded as lovely and soft, into cruel and unsightly lines. It raised the hairs at his nape. It struck him with unvarying parts of horror and disbelief, for he hardly recognized the woman abreast of him.

This menacing creature bore no likeness to the Sera who had captured his heart. The woman he knew and loved had been charming and unabashedly coquettish. Her laughter, infectious and often likened to a melodious lilt, had lit up a room. Her resplendent beauty and incandescent smile had vied with the sun, but that Sera had been an impostor. The woman gazing at him with resentment burning in her eyes was one crafted of untruths and nefarious designs. There was no radiance or tenderhearted sentiments to be attained in that fiery black stare, there was nothing but a simmering malevolence.

"You will return by nightfall ..." she instructed with unequivocal callousness, "And set fire to the village. You will spare no one."

In the interim of those cold, soulless eyes assessing him, he struggled to determine how they had gotten here. When had their love devolved into an all-consuming hatred? When had he lost Sera to the wickedness that branded her heart? Had she ever truly loved him? Or had his feelings gone unrequited? What he thought to be an honest and transparent love, had in sooth, been nothing short of a lie.

A sudden tightness in his chest had him pressing a fist against the spot just above his heart. The uncomfortable twinge took him aback for it felt much akin to betrayal, for she had deceived him.

She intended to use the one person that mattered above all else to acquire her misguided revenge, and all at the expense of his heart and soul.

Lines bracketed his mouth as he clenched his jaw in anger.

"Ah," Sera purred, "There is that fire so alike mine."

"I'm nothing like you." Don sneered.

A corner of her mouth hitched into a sly grin, "I suppose that all depends on whose life you value more." Her black as sin eyes shifted to the thick vegetation encompassing them, and in return, the woodlands swayed as if coaxed by the enchantress adjacent to him. "You will do this because I require it. Do not force my hand in doing something that cannot be undone, but if I must take what you cherish most to obtain what I desire, then so be it."