Beauty and the Beasts

Chapter One

My life would never be the same again.

I lived with my little sister and my mother my entire life, my father was said to have been shot dead before I was born, and due to debt my mother owed from loans she had taken from our local mafia, she had been forced to sell herself for money to escape their wrath. That was how my baby sister was conceived.

Mother had looked after us to the best of her ability, but she, like the rest of the town we lived in, was indebted to the mafia. They had threatened her, beat her and raped her, but she never let them near me or my baby sister, Wendy.

Today however, her troubles finally ended. With her death.

For years, my entire life in fact, we've dealt with the lackeys of the actual crime boss in the mafia, whose name was Acnologia. He had never shown himself to us before because he preferred to stay in his mansion with his trophy wife Anna Heartfillia.

Recently, news spread the streets that he discovered his wife's infidelity with one of her body guards, a man named Jude, who also happened to be one of my dearest friends' father, and Anna's sisters' husband. He had his men gang rape Jude's wife Layla, and his daughter, Lucy, and mutilated Jude's wife beyond recognition as vengeance. When Jude finally returned home and found them in the raw state of their abuse, Lucy, who had run away at her mother's pleas, only barely escaped being shot dead along with her mother.

Jude had run back to the mansion to try and kidnap Anna, but he was too late. Just out of town, on the road to the upper-class city, was where her body had been set on display for the entire town to bear witness. It was still there too, only rotting and festered with flies and maggots. His had joined hers, for there had been an ambush waiting for him when he had arrived. He had been forced to eat Anna's bloody heart, and after Acnologia's men had raped and beaten him, he had been strung up, and left to die on a crucifix stake.

People who witnessed what happened told of his moans and pleas for the people to help him, even if only to end his suffering, but no one dared. He didn't deserve help, but any decent person with a shred of humanity wouldn't be able to watch a man suffer like that. Still, we did nothing. We all knew we would have joined him if we attempted to go against Acnologia's wishes.

He had, understandingly, been in a foul mood since then, and decided to accompany his debt collectors and protection money retrievers before he would return to his home in the upper city. The purpose? To remind the down towners that he was in no way, an urban legend, or a mere boogieman in the dark.

That is how only a week later, today, he turned up at our door.

He sent his goons to pillage our valuables to make up the sum of our increasing debt we had inevitably failed to pay back over the years. My mother begged him not to take out heirlooms, because they were all she had left to hand down to us. He paid her no mind, until I was pulled out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.

I screamed as my shoulder slammed into the cheap plaster wall, bruising me, and making a rather large dent in the wall. I fell to the floor in a heap. My mother tried to rush to my side, but Acnologia pulled her back by her hair with one hand, and forcibly squeezed her face until she submissively turned her head to look at him.

"Her. Give me this girl for my next wife, and all your debts will be forgiven," he bargained, or rather demanded.

"Please, not her! She is my baby! She has only just turned fifteen!" My mother pleaded, but he pushed her back into a broken chair violently, and turned to stare at me.

"Girl, come with me now. Your family will be saved from their debts, and I will give you the greatest riches and pleasures this world has to offer, all you have to do is become my wife, and mother our children," he said to me coaxingly, trying to sound reasonable and charming.