Chapter 8
Chapter eight
The Confession of Thorns
Annabel
The castle is eerily still, as if it is holding its breath.
The once-restless corridors do not shift beneath my steps as usual; the floors lie quiet, refusing to creak or groan.
Shadows cling to the corners, unnatural and unmoving, while the torches lining the walls burn with an uncanny steadiness, their flames whispering secrets too quiet to decipher, no longer shrieking but murmuring as if warning of something unseen.
The air is dense, charged with anticipation.
It’s as though the house itself has ceased to live and breathe, suspended in a hush that prickles along my skin.
Something, I am certain, has changed, some balance tipped or some ancient will subdued.
Erik's voice breaks through the silence. “Anabel, why are you wandering the halls alone at this hour? It isn’t safe.”
I pause, glancing at him. “I wish I could choose where to go, but the castle leads me wherever it pleases. I have no control over its passages."
He sighs, nodding slowly. “I understand. The castle has strange effects on those who stay within its walls, as I’m sure you have realized by now. I myself can’t resist its pull, especially where Lucien is concerned. It binds me, in ways I can barely explain.”
I remember the mirrors from the other night. “Could it be that the curse is relinquishing its hold?” I ask myself. I shake my head, convinced it just isn’t possible.
Whatever the case, this change makes me uneasy.
It has been two days since our harrowing encounter in the hall of mirrors, and I have spent every hour since barricaded in my room, my heart racing at every distant footfall and flickering shadow.
Meals have arrived at my door with uncanny regularity, sometimes brought by Erik himself and other times delivered by silent servants whose faces I do not recognize.
I have not dared to seek him out, nor has he summoned me, not with his words nor with the peculiar tug I sometimes feel in my bones. For these two days, the castle has been a maze I have chosen not to wander. Isolation has become my fragile refuge, but it is a refuge built on dread.
But something is shifting. The silence thickens, and the oppressive stillness presses down on me until I can’t bear it any longer.
A quiet summons pulses through the corridors, threading into my thoughts.
I can’t ignore it. My feet carry me, almost against my will, through the labyrinth of stone and shadow, past the torches that watch me with flame-bright eyes.
He is biding his time. I sense him everywhere, waiting and watching.
Tonight, I find him in the library, the door ajar as if inviting me into a lair of something both monstrous and magnificent. My pulse hammers with each step, every instinct screaming caution as I cross the threshold, knowing that whatever has changed is waiting for me within these walls.
The great doors groan open and reveal him slouched in a high-back chair, his claws draped over the arms as though he has grown weary of carrying their weight. Books tower in precarious stacks around him, their spines cracked and their pages wilted with age. The air smells of dust and parchment.
His eyes lift, molten and weary. “Annabel,” he says breathlessly.
My name coils around me. He says it as though he has been holding it behind his teeth, saving it for a night like this.
I force myself forward, though my chest trembles with every step. Suddenly I can no longer hold in the questions that have plagued me for the last two days, and I must speak. “Why?” My voice breaks, but I do not stop. “Why this? Why cruelty, cages, and curses? What has led you to this?”
His horns tilt slightly, shadowing his face. “You seek many answers.” He hesitates and sighs heavily. “Do you want the truth or a fabrication to make it pretty?”
“I want the truth.” My wrist flares, the mark pulsing with painful heat. “If I am to rot in this place with you, I will not do it blindly. I must know why.”
He studies me, hands flexing against the chair’s arms. For a moment, I think he will send me away or, worse, punish me for my boldness. Instead he exhales, a sound ragged as torn cloth. For the first time, I see raw emotion cross his expression.
He does not speak at first. The silence unspools between us, thick and suffocating, until at last his voice breaks through, rough as gravel.
“There was a time,” he murmurs, each word heavy with the ache of memory, “when I was not this twisted thing you see before you. I was a man. A husband. A father.”
“The man I saw in the mirrors.”
He sighs heavily. “Yes.”
His shoulders tremble, as if the weight of those identities threatens to crush him. He does not look at me; his gaze drifts far beyond the room, chasing ghosts I can’t see. Shadows flicker across his face, revealing the torment etched deep into his features.
“My wife, Evangeline…” His breath hitches when he says her name, and he squeezes his eyes shut.
“Her hair burned with the color of flame, like the last blaze of sunset before night swallows the world. She was the most beautiful woman, inside and out. My daughter, Grace, her laughter rang through these halls, bright and pure as a bell at dawn. They both were my compass, guiding me through every storm, guiding me through life. My kingdom flourished because their light held back the darkness.”
His words falter, tangled in grief. For a moment, the oppressive hush of the castle presses in, urging me to hold my breath lest I shatter the fragile reminiscence.
His claws curl slowly into fists, the tips digging deep grooves into the ancient wood of the chair’s arms. The wood creaks beneath the strain, small, brittle sounds that must echo his own breaking.
He shudders, and his voice drops to barely above a whisper.
“Then, in a blink of an eye, they were stolen from me.” Each word lands like a blow, and agony flickers across his eyes.
“A letter arrived, stained and creased, the words scrawled like venom. They demanded ransom, a promise that gold could buy their safety. I obeyed. I paid every coin without hesitation. I would have torn out my own heart if it meant seeing them safe.”
The air grows colder, thick with the agony of things lost and promises betrayed. The torment in his voice lingers long after the last word fades, leaving the room trembling on the edge of something terrible and true.
He leans forward, the fire in his eyes flaring dangerously, like an inferno barely restrained.
His trembling hands continue to dig into the armrests.
“When I found them, I was too late. The cottage was ominously silent, every shadow heavy with dread. I stepped inside, and the air itself seemed to recoil from the horror within.” His words falter, his breath hitching.
“Evangeline lay crumpled, her flame-bright hair stained and tangled, her spirit shattered beyond repair. Grace, my sweet precious Grace, was silenced forever. I dropped to my knees, unable to scream, unable even to weep.”
He bows his head, his voice splintering with anguish, the room vibrating with the raw agony that pours from him.
“In that moment, something in me was torn away, ripped out, and burned to ash.” He hesitates and takes a deep breath.
“I died there. What rose from my body was not a man but this.” He gestures to himself.
“Something scarred and monstrous, forged by grief and rage.”
His confession hangs between us thick as fog, and I can see the torment carved into the lines of his face, the tears he refuses to shed glistening in the corners of his molten eyes. He is lost, caught between memory and nightmare and haunted by the ghosts of all he loved and all he became.
I clutch my arms to steady myself. “Who?” The word scrapes out, my voice hoarse. “Who did this? Who took them? Why?”
His eyes lock onto mine, a flash of anguish sharpening his features.
For a heartbeat, I am certain he will refuse to answer me, but at last something inside him breaks.
His voice emerges, dark and trembling. “The letter… It carried no signature, no mercy. Only a mark etched in black wax, a serpent coiled around a crown of thorns and roses. I traced the symbol through every kingdom I could reach, scrawled it into walls until my fingers bled, forced it from the lips of dying men.” He swallows, the memory searing.
“But all I ever found was silence, a silence deeper than any grave.”
My own breath falters, ragged in my throat. “You… You tried to find them?” The question trembles out of me, shattered with hope and horror, though I already know the answer from the haunted look in his eyes.
His laugh erupts, jagged and bitter. The sound held nothing like joy, more like something torn from a wound that refuses to heal.
“Tried?” he spits, his voice trembling with a fury that borders on madness.
“I did more than try. I razed villages to the ground for the faintest rumor… set homes ablaze just to chase a whisper through the smoke. I hunted down bandits in the night, cornered barons with trembling hands, and slaughtered knights whose rings bore that cursed serpent winding through thorns and roses. I demanded confessions, begged for answers. But their lips stayed sealed, their eyes blank. Nobody had answers. Maybe they truly knew nothing. Maybe I was only killing ghosts, chasing shadows, and destroying the wrong men again and again. All I knew is they were some type of society, and they wanted me. And they did not think twice to use my family to get to me.”
His nails gouge deep, violent furrows into the ancient wood of the chair, sparks spitting from the friction as if even the furniture is recoiling from his pain.
His tone drops lower, thick and guttural.
“The truth became ash on the wind, Annabel. I chased it with every breath until grief hollowed me out, until vengeance consumed everything I was. When nothing remained except broken promises and empty hands, cruelty was all I had left. It was the only thing grief did not devour. And it was exactly what they wanted.”
I swallow, my throat burning as though I’d swallowed embers. “And yet,” I whisper, my voice barely holding together. “You spared me.”
He bows his head, his horns casting jagged shadows across his blazing eyes.
“Did I?” His voice slips out as barely a whisper, raw and trembling.
“Or have I only traded one torment for another, choosing a slower, more cruel ruin for you?” His words hang in the air, brittle and aching, each syllable heavy with regret and self-loathing.
The mark on my wrist erupts, searing like a living coal pressed against my skin, its blaze answering him as if bound to his agony. The air between us grows taut and barbed, humming with a threat neither of us dares to put into words. Every breath I take feels perilous.
I should retreat. I should flee before the castle’s walls awaken, before the stones and shadows conspire to seal me inside their ancient, shifting maze. My instincts scream for escape. My pulse hammers wild and frantic in my throat.
But I do not move. I am rooted to the spot, my limbs trembling, held fast by something deeper than fear or defiance.
Because in the cavernous silence of his confession, I finally see the echoes of the man the enchanted mirrors revealed, not the monstrous warden but the weary husband, the broken father…
the prince hollowed by grief and haunted by loss.
The mask of the Beast slips, and for an instant, the flicker of his former self glimmers beneath the ruin, anguished and desperate, every line of his body carved by a sorrow he can’t escape.
As the shadows press closer and his pain threatens to swallow us both, the most dangerous, fragile hope takes root inside me.
If he was once that man, if even a shred of him has survived, perhaps he could find his way back.
Perhaps the torment burning in his eyes is not an ending but the beginning of something neither of us understands yet.
The possibility trembles between us, sharp as a blade and just as likely to cut.
And then, he is gone. I was so lost in thought over what he had revealed to me that I didn’t even see him leave. I can hear his footsteps fading off in the distance.