Hunted(70)

Asenka’s breath tangled in her throat, audible with Yeva so close to her. For the first time Yeva could remember, her sister pulled away from her and sat up, retreating to the corner of the bed and drawing up her knees. “Yeva,” she gasped, anger tinting her voice. “He’s your fiancé. I would never—it was a girlish whim, a childish fancy I set aside long ago.”

Yeva’s heart ached, because she could see the lie even in the dark, shining from Asenka’s eyes more brightly than the moonlight from the window. “Asenka—has he fallen in love with you, too?”

Asenka’s eyes flashed. “Of course not,” she spluttered. “He loves you, he’s marrying you. He wants to spend the rest of his life with you, he always has, since he met you.”

“Even when he thought I was dead?” Yeva asked gently.

“It doesn’t matter!” Asenka’s voice was suddenly fierce. “I never believed you were gone. I knew you were alive. I knew you would come back, and I knew he must be here, waiting for you, when you did.”

“Oh, Asenka.” Yeva reached out, groping until she found her sister’s hand. “If you love him, and he loves you, you must accept that. I won’t be the one who comes between you.”

“No,” Asenka snapped, her voice as steely as when she’d sent Solmir from the leech’s shop. “He was meant for you.”

“I don’t want him.” Yeva spoke as gently as she could. “Oh, I care for him—I care for him very much. I can never repay all that he did for us. But Asenka, I’ve realized . . . he wasn’t doing all of it for me. He was doing it for you.”

Asenka had begun to cry, and was shaking her head again and again. “No,” she said, voice thick. “Yeva, you are my sister. I love you. I love you more than anything. You and Lena are the most important things in all the world.” She finally squeezed Yeva’s hand back, swallowing audibly. “I would give up a thousand Solmirs for you.”

Yeva crawled forward and slid her arms around Asenka’s waist. “I know. But I’m not in love with him. Not the way you are. Asenka, I want you to be with him. I want it for you both.”

Asenka’s tears overflowed and she gave a wordless sob. A memory hit Yeva, the force of it robbing her of breath: a single sob, lost in the darkness in the back of the hunting cabin, the night Solmir had come to propose to Yeva and Asenka had seen where his heart lay. Yeva pulled her sister close, and they sat that way, rocking together, bound and twisted up in the bedclothes and murmuring to each other.

Finally Asenka’s tears slowed, and she lifted her head. Yeva brushed her hair from her eyes and touched the tears from her cheeks, just as Asenka used to do for her when Yeva would come crying to her for comfort.

“But you must marry Solmir,” Asenka whispered, her eyes intent.

“Why?” Yeva shook her head, unable to think why her sister was so insistent.

“Because if he doesn’t hold you here, you will go back.” Asenka reached up to lay her hand against Yeva’s cheek. “Back to the Beast.”

Yeva’s heart twitched and leaped, and she caught her breath. “What? Don’t—don’t be absurd. Why would I go back?”

But as they sat there together, and Yeva held Asenka until she drifted off to sleep, her sister’s words echoed in her mind over and over, until they settled into place, like a missing piece that filled the exact shape of the hollow in her heart she’d been trying to ignore.

Back to the Beast.





BEAST


We run. We hunt. We feed.

We are of the forest and of magic, and we have always been. We glory in the kill.

We are the Beast,

and we will always be.





TWENTY-TWO


THAT NIGHT YEVA’S VISION of the Beast was a nightmare. She dreamed she was the deer, and that the Beast was stalking her through the wood. She could not see or hear or smell him, but some deep-rooted instinct knew he was there. She knew she was prey.

But when she woke gasping, it was not the thought of being caught and consumed that echoed in her fear-muddled mind. All she could see were the Beast’s eyes, red and fixated on her, full of bloodlust and nothing more. They held no humanity, no sense—not even the careful cunning of a predator. The eyes were simply mad, like those of a rabid animal. They were not the eyes of the creature, man or Beast, she’d come to know in the castle.

She rose before any of the servants and stoked the fires in the sitting room and the kitchen, and put a kettle of water on to boil for tea. The tasks reminded her of her life in the hunting cabin with her family, and she felt a twinge of loss as she stood warming her fingers and toes before the flames. She knew her sisters would remember those few months as a time of terrible hardship and fear, but Yeva couldn’t help but see them as the start of a journey that would change her forever.

For she was changed. Yeva knew that to live here, among her family and the townsfolk and the bricks and mortar and steel and bustle, would require diligence and focus. She could not think of the forest, of Lamya and the music and the things she’d seen deep in the castle valley, of the thrill of that other world. She would not remember how alive she’d been when she was the animal, focused on nothing but the hunt.

Because Asenka was right. Without Solmir, without the knowledge that she must keep her promise, that she must make him happy to repay him for all he’d done, that she must make herself happy and pretend that this life still held a place shaped for her to slip into . . . without all that, what her heart most wanted was to return. Her nightmare needled her, a gnawing worry for the Beast himself. Though it was only a dream, she could not shake the fear that there was some truth in it—that without her, the Beast’s humanity was slipping away.