Author: Alyse Zaftig
Category: Paranormal
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/32470_11
The beast couldn’t touch the cottage. It had belonged to his first love, before the curse took him. And the beast had loved her even more than he had. It was a sacred place. It was the only reminder they had of her and her scent still clung faintly to the fabric inside.
Liam again prepared food for Rose. He baked bread and spooned out more of his stolen honey. He caught salmon and prepared them and even raided the root cellar for veggies. After all, she couldn’t be expected to live on bread and honey alone. But before she awoke to enjoy the meal, he fled.
It was instinct. Something was wrong. He caught no strange scents, but still his ears prickled with a sense of disaster.
And his beast was being suspiciously quiet.
The beast was planning on sabotaging him. That’s what it was. It wanted Rose gone.
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The beast was going to find a way to pull back his hood, to reveal his hideous nature to her. It would look like an accident but would be anything but. And as kind and gracious as Rose had been, he had no illusions about how she’d react when she saw his face forever frozen in mid-shift between bear and man.
Liam found chores to do deep in the woods and before darkness came he locked himself in iron chains to a towering sequoia. Restrained, he’d be unable to do anything awful to Rose.
But the chains were no match for the beast’s rage and it took no time at all for him to smash them open and run back home to howl at the cottage door. With every roar he was shrieking get out and go away and we don’t need you! But Rose didn’t speak bear.
On the third morning, she was still there. Liam’s heart leapt with joy that he hadn’t scared her away. He knew that she couldn’t stay forever—even to consider the idea was monumentally unfair to her. He lived in squalor and she was thoughtful and kind and gorgeous. Asking her to stay even a day longer would be a cruelty he could never live with.
If he let himself dream—and he often did—he could imagine a future with her. They could marry. He had an inheritance—it wasn’t much, but it would be enough to fix up the house and keep them comfortable enough. She could live upstairs, and him down. But what life would that be for her? He needed help to do even the most basic human things. No matter if they fixed the house and had fresh food and electricity and the hundred tiny things you take for granted every day—he was getting worse. He couldn’t tie himself to her. He’d be like an anchor around her ankle as she swam to shore.
No.
He’d make the best of the days she remained, but he couldn’t let himself grow too fond of her. He couldn’t get attached.
After gathering ingredients for breakfast he decided to go check on her car. Perhaps Pete had flagged it as abandoned? Perhaps there was some way he could help? And perhaps he could learn more about her from the wreck.
She’d crashed farther away than he’d expected, making her journey during the storm even more impressive in retrospect. Her car—a tiny Honda—had slid off the road very near where he’d first incurred the curse. Walking the muddy roads brought the memory back in a flash.
He could see himself on that night, driving his vintage Mustang. It had been a cold night. No rain, but a vicious wind.
There’d been a hitchhiker on the side of the road. A drop-dead gorgeous blonde in her late twenties with long flowing hair and shorts that didn’t even cover her ass. She looked too good to be true.
Liam had pulled over. He’d offered her a ride. And then, when they hadn’t even driven five minutes, he’d told her that she needed to pay him for the ride. Not with money, but with her body. He could hear himself, with his cocky pretty-boy voice saying, “Gas or ass, no one rides for free.” That phrase haunted his nightmares.
The memory of that night was a dagger in Liam’s mind. He’d been so young and so dumb and so very, very rude to that woman.
He remembered sliding his hand up her thigh as they drove, as if her body belonged to him just because she was in his car. She’d been cold. Stiff. But as his fingers had neared her sex, she had changed. Her youth fell away revealing a skin that looked like hardened oak. Her fingers were gnarled and thin. Her voice grew raspy and tight.
The woman was a witch. She’d unleashed powerful magics that night, cursing him for his behavior and turning him into the beast he was today. He’d broken one of the most fundamental rules of civilization. He’d refused help to a traveler in need. And for his unkindness, he had been made forever half a man.
Liam lost himself in memories and regrets. Being on that road made it very easy to gorge on recriminations.
He reacted too late when a car drove past, filled with heavily armed men.
“Where on earth could they be going?” he thought, and then realized that they were the trouble Rose was fleeing.
Liam took off on a run through the woods. There were no shortcuts from the road to his home. The forest was too thick and the brambles too dense, but he tore through the forest as fast as he could, losing his thick boots to the mud, his pants to a blackberry bramble, and most of his shirt to an old gnarled pricker bush. By the time he reached the house he only had his canvas hooded cloak to wear. He pulled it tight around him and stalked off towards the cottage.
Three men leaned against the car—a limousine, thickly caked in mud—and had the look of men who were happy to hurt people
for money. At the door of the cottage was another figure—an older man, perhaps fifty, wearing a light gray suit. The man was bellowing and banging on the cottage door. He was shouting at Rose, demanding she hand over her phone.
The beast inside Liam went still with rage as this man—his skin orange from bronzer—kicked the cottage door open and then dragged Rose out. The man beamed with a childish pride and held her phone high above his head.
“See this boys?” he said to the three goons. “This is what we came here to get. This dumb bitch thought she could blackmail me. She recorded me saying some things to her. Allegedly, you know? But she’s a very mean person. She’s a liar. You can’t trust anything on this phone.” He paused and looked at the phone again. “And anyway, it was all out of context. It was a joke.”
Rose was unharmed, Liam could see that. But she was terrified. The woman had gone still with fear, crumpling in on herself as if by making herself as small as possible she’d escape the man in the suit.
“Emil, I want you to take this phone and break it please. Just smash the bejeezus out of it.” One of the goons stepped forward, took the phone and threw it straight through the cottage window. The window broke. The phone didn’t.