The moment I awaken I root beneath my pillow for the hidden key. Sweet little Jocelyn. She hid it so well not even the Beast could find it. I’ve been saving this for something special. Something well worth the punishment it will incur when I unlock these shackles.
The chains that bind me fall away and I am free for the first time in centuries. There is a pair of pants set out on the chair. I dress with haste and exit my chambers. The guards shout a warning, but I ignore them and run straight to the east wing. It’s still my goddamned castle and I can go wherever the hell I please.
They give chase and rouse half the damn staff with their yelling for no good reason. I let them catch me at the studio door. They are winded and out of sorts, easy to defeat, if I should decide to do so. I don’t, and after a few minutes of the three of us just standing there while a crowd of gawkers gathers, I shake them loose. “Stay outside,” I growl, thoroughly annoyed at how long it takes them to collect their jaws off the floor and release me. I close the door in their stunned faces.
The Beast has been busy in my absence. The studio is a mess of splattered paints and canvases ruined by his heavy paw. He’s kept all of them, carefully stacked all around like the makings of some holy shrine to his talent—or lack thereof. I root around in the stacks for the one I want. There are three relatively salvageable scrawls among these. In one, she is seated regal as a queen on the settee in the library. In another, she is standing in the garden, her eyes closed as she smells a rose bloom. In the third, she is asleep in my bed, her hair spread out on my pillow, her hand slightly curled by her face.
I want none of them. These are the Beast’s fantasies, not mine.
The one I seek is just by the door, half hidden by a drawing of a rag doll and a canvas accidentally punched out of its frame. I pull it out carefully and set it on the easel. It took more concentration than I thought possible to make the Beast set this one aside before he ruined it.
This is her, my Strength, the way she ought to look always. The Beast traced her hair adequately, the long waves flowing over her back, baring one shoulder. I trace the line of her lips with my fingertips, brush the rise of her cheek, her temple. She is perfect. Sensual and innocent, strong yet delicate.
I stare at her for a long time, not trusting myself to pick up a paint brush and ruin the near divinity of her face. Eventually I realize the night is passing me by and soon the Beast will rise again to take her away from me. I could hate him just for that. His drawings are stick figures compared to the masterpiece I intend to finish. I can see her coming alive for me and my hand reaches for a brush.
I paint with measured haste, conscious of the time and what little I have left, as well as the delicacy of the task before me. A single careless stroke could ruin her. Very soon her skin begins to take on the tone of warmth and seduction. I paint her lips a teasing pink, and her eyes the purest blue I can emulate.
There’s not enough time. All too soon the sun is rising and I’ve just enough time to hide her out of harm’s way before I disappear.
The Beast is too busy butchering his own sketches to notice the time and I awake directly in the studio. My pants are in shreds, but I don’t care, just as he didn’t when he tore them. I set my Beauty on the easel at once. Her hair is tricky. It takes careful alchemy to mix just the right amount of each shade to create the rich hue of auburn and even when I think I have achieved it, the minutest of faults make me return to her again and again to get everything just... perfect.
The servants stop bothering to restrain me. Since both the Beast and I spend most of our time in the studio we are rarely in my chambers to be chained. But as long as I don’t stray outside of it, the guards don’t seem to care what I do. It suits my purposes.
For years this goes on, the Beast drawing his scenes as I paint my Strength three nights at a time and hide the progress where I know he will never look if he has something of his own to focus on. My obsession is absolute. Perhaps it’s why I never feel him rise inside me to look at her through my eyes; why he doesn’t seem to remember my mind when I’m gone, nor I his when I wake. We don’t want to. We have her now and neither of us is willing to share.
Little by little, my Strength comes to life beneath my brush. Her long lashes cast a soft shadow against her cheek, minuscule flecks of green light up her eyes, her face glows with some inner light I know I will never feel, and her lips glisten enticingly, until all I can think of is kissing them.
She is naked in my vision, but positioned in such a way that only her bare shoulder hints at her nudity—turned sideways, her arms crossed to cover her breasts, one delicate hand resting against her shoulder. The curvature of her silhouette is only hinted at with a play of shadow and shading, and the canvas cuts her off at the hip. It is just large enough to make her appear lifelike, as if she could step out of the portrait at any moment.
But she is not finished.
In the fifth year since I beheld her outline, I add the final detail, one that, thinking back, never should have marred her effortless grace. I cannot help myself. My hand moves of its own accord, tracing the outline of an object that ought to be alien to her. Somehow, it is not. It’s as much part of her as it is of me—the symbol of my curse and my redemption alike.
Petal after petal, a blood red rose appears in her hand. The bloom is so large that even resting against her shoulder it just brushes the line of her jaw. A foreign, heavy layer of paint added to an already magnificent work of art and still the cursed thing seem so natural I don’t know why it wasn’t there from the beginning.
On the third and final night of another full moon, I am finished. The brush drops from my numb fingers as I step back to behold the most beautiful creature I have ever dared to dream. I reach out a hand, half expecting her skin to warm to my touch. My torment is complete.
And I realize I will never see her.
If she did not appear in the three hundred years of my imprisonment, she never will. And even if she somehow does, as the hag foretold, the Beast will never let her near me. The selfish bastard will keep her all to himself to shield her from my wicked ways. He will chain me again, high up in that goddamned tower, far away where no one will hear my cries. She will never even know I exist, and with the Beast playing the gentleman, the tormented victim, she will never even wonder at his other side.
In that moment, I despise the Beast with every fiber of my cursed being.
But he is part of me and there is only so much hate I can stomach before it turns outward and then I hate her. That teasing little smile, the mischievous glint in her eyes, the way she is completely bare, yet I still can’t see more than the merest hint of her flesh.
I hurl the palette against the wall and pick up a knife just as the sun is about to rise. I manage to cut a long, satisfyingly jagged line across the canvas before the bastard takes me over.
The Beast awakens to a knife in his paw, lying on the floor of the studio. He groans in residual pain and confusion as he throws the blade away and rises. His claws scratch into paint and he immediately raises that paw off a finished portrait.
Breath leaves him at the sight. It’s her, far more lifelike than his clumsy drawings could ever make her, and she is magnificent. Stunning.
And Bastien has wrecked her.
His heart breaks at the cut that rips across her face. What sort of monster would do such a thing, destroy something so beautiful?
Bastien would.
The Beast gently picks up the painting. He will not set it on the easel; won’t leave it in this dusty place. He carries his Beauty back to his chambers and hangs her portrait on the wall facing the window. A place of honor, where he can look upon her each morning.
It is there, gazing into her bright blue eyes, that he realizes that if, by some miracle of mercy, she is real and finds her way to the Beast, he can never trust her safety to Bastien.
He will never risk her around his human half.
If she is real, he vows, she will never know the monster in a human skin exists.