Page 29 of Betraying the Beast

She stood frozen in the doorway, her hands trembling at her sides. Her heart screamed yes. But duty… love… they warred inside her.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

He nodded once, a sharp, broken motion. He turned to the rising sun bleeding through the treetops. “Then go,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Go before I change my mind.”

She lingered a moment longer, caught in the doorway like a soul between worlds. Then she moved, crossing the room and lifting the sack to her shoulder. The dagger remained where it lay.

“I will come back,” she said quietly, her voice trembling. “Once I free them, I will return.”

He turned then, slowly—too slowly—and the look on his face stole the breath from her lungs.

Fury. Pain. Despair.

“Never return,” he snarled, his voice no longer man, no longer lover. “If you come back, I will kill you. And all who come with you.”

She stumbled backward, the force of his rage like a blow. Her heart thudded painfully against her ribs, tears rising fast. She turned and ran, the sack heavy across her shoulder, the weight of her choices even heavier.

Behind her, his roar echoed through the stone halls, chasing her down the corridor like a warning—and a farewell.

She didn’t stop.

She couldn’t stop.

Tears blinded her, but she kept running, as if distance might dull the sound of her heart breaking.

Vael’Zhur watched her leave from the turret, his massive hands braced against the cold stone as the distant figure of Ceryn moved toward the trees. Already, madness curled around the edges of his mind like fog creeping over a battlefield—insidious, relentless. The clarity she’d given him was slipping. Her scent still lingered on his skin, but her warmth was already fading from his bed. From his life.

A small, aching part of him had hoped—believed—she might turn. That she would stop, spin on her heel, run back to him. That she would choose him over duty, over blood. Over her family.

But he had asked too much.

She had to know, didn’t she? That they were already lost to her. Aldaric lacked all sense of mercy. There was no honor in him, no humanity. He would hold Ceryn’s family hostage only long enough to make her suffer. Long enough to let her believe she had a chance. Then he would kill them, precisely when the blade would cut deepest.

And still, Vael’Zhur had let her go.

“You let her go,” Elodia said softly behind him, her voice as calm and ancient as the wind brushing the spires. She stood to his right, ever watchful, ever unshaken.

“I did,” he replied, though the words scraped his throat raw.

“With silverfruit.” No accusation in her tone. Just truth, spoken plainly. “Was it a test?”

“No.” He exhaled slowly. “Though it really was.”

Below, Ceryn hesitated at the edge of the forest. She glanced back, and his heart stalled. For a breathless moment, he thought—hoped—she would turn. That some sliver of feeling would pull her back to him.

But then she slipped beneath the trees, swallowed by shadow. And he exhaled, the sound hollow in his chest.

That was it, then. She had chosen. And, like everyone else in his long and cursed life, she had not chosen him.

Why would she? He had nothing to offer her but ruin. A crumbling castle bound to blood and magic, haunted by the dead. A tattered beast, cursed and breaking, with a name she had nearly saved but could never truly restore. He couldn’t even blame her. He wouldn't want her to stay—not really. She deserved more. Light. Life. Freedom.

He turned from the window, shoulders heavy with the weight of heartbreak and failure. She had been his last hope. The final chance to unravel the name that shackled him. To remember the man he once was. The name Auren had meant something when she spoke it. Now, it would fade into history with the rest of him.

The curse had already begun to reclaim him, inch by inch. Soon, even his memories would belong to the beast. The line between man and monster blurred more with every breath. His thoughts splintered. His control slipped.

He looked at Elodia.

She stood with a few of the castle’s other ghostly attendants—those who had lingered long after their deaths, bound to duty, to him. Their faces shimmered in the half-light, more emotion in their spectral eyes than many of the living had ever shown him.

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