CHAPTER 4: THE BEAST WITHIN

KATHLEEN

The door creaked. I swallowed hard and stepped through, my trembling hands pulling it shut behind me.

I lifted my gaze to the thing standing in front of me, and my soul left my body on the spot.

He was massive — inhumanly tall, fur matted with blood, claws long enough to gut me in a single swipe.

Smoke curled from his nostrils with every ragged breath. His eyes, when they found mine, held nothing human left in them at all. Just hunger. Just rage.

He roared the second he saw me, the sound shaking something loose in my chest.

He wasn't in his human form.

Whatever curse Casper had cast on him hadn't just broken his mind — it had broken his shape, twisted him between man and monster that answered to neither name anymore.

Every instinct screamed at me to run. I stayed rooted to the floor instead.

I can't show him fear. If I run, I die. If I flinch, I die. I have to be braver than I've ever been in my life, right now, in this room.

I needed him to eat. Somehow. Some way.

I glanced down at the tray still balanced in my shaking hands — the food actually smelled good.

And despite everything, despite the corpses I'd just watched being carried out of another room, my stomach twisted with hunger of its own.

I forced my gaze back up to him.

"You need to calm down," I said, aiming for something steady, something that didn't betray how close I was to falling apart. "I'm not your enemy."

"Out." The word tore out of him like a growl.

I didn't move. "I brought you food." I held the tray out toward him, arms shaking. "Please. Eat something. Stop — stop hurting people."

He moved faster than I could track.

One second the tray was in my hands, and the next it was gone, sent clattering across the room as he shoved me hard enough to slam my back into the stone wall.

"Shit—" The curse ripped out of me along with the pain, white and blinding, and my knees buckled.

I forced my eyes open to find his hand wrapped around my throat, lifting me slightly off the ground, his claws pressing just short of breaking skin.

My whole life narrowed down to that single point of pressure against my windpipe.

I clawed uselessly at his wrist, gasping for air that wouldn't come.

"Who. Are. You?" His voice cracked through the room. His grip was tightening.

I understood, with total clarity, that one wrong word, one wrong breath would be the last thing I ever did.

"Y-you haven't eaten," I managed, barely a whisper, black spots crowding the edges of my vision. "Hunger— it makes people violent. It's not — it's not really you."

"I don't care!" He roared it directly into my face.

The sound alone nearly undid me.

"B-but I care." The words fell out of me before I understood why I was saying them, eyes squeezed shut, bracing for the end. "Everyone cares about you."

It was true, wasn't it — in its own twisted way.

Everyone around him wanted him alive enough to drag fifteen girls to their deaths trying to save him.

That wasn't love, but it was something close enough that the lie didn't feel entirely like a lie.

His grip loosened all at once.

I dropped hard onto the stone floor, and something in my ankle screamed as it twisted beneath me.

"Ouch—" A sob broke loose along with the pain, tears spilling before I could stop them.

He turned away from me without another word and crossed the room to sit heavily on the edge of his bed.

I pressed a hand to my throat, certain I'd find it bruised raw. My eyes went wide with the realization creeping in slowly behind the panic.

‘Wait. He didn't kill me.’

‘I'm still breathing.’ The words echoed in my head.

I looked over at him — eyes shut now, chest heaving with each labored breath, still trapped in that monstrous shape, but no longer looking at me like something to destroy.

He's not entirely gone. There's still something left in there.

Without letting myself think too hard about it. I pushed up off the floor, ignoring the throb in my ankle. I gathered what food I could salvage from the mess scattered across the tiles.

I carried it back over and stood in front of him again.

"Leave," he rumbled, not even opening his eyes.

"No. Not until you eat, big king." The words left my mouth before I fully processed the reckless courage behind them.

His eyes snapped open, fixing on me — still burning, still lit dangerously, and I took an involuntary step back despite myself.

He extended a hand toward me, and I flinched hard, certain this was it, certain I'd finally pushed too far.

But his claws closed instead around the chicken leg still sitting on the tray, drawing it slowly to his mouth.

He hesitated only a second before he bit down.

Relief washed through me, warm and immediate — until it wasn't.

His head snapped up. He sniffed once, sharp and sudden, then again, and again, faster each time, his expression twisting between confusion and fury.

He hurled the chicken leg across the room and rose to his full height in one violent motion.

I stumbled back instantly.

His eyes had changed — not calmer, not clearer, but worse, burning with an intensity that made my stomach drop through the floor.

I kept retreating, my mind racing, trying to understand what had shifted, what I'd done wrong in the span of two heartbeats.

He kept sniffing, eyes locked on my body now instead of my face, and ice-cold terror flooded through every inch of me.

What is he thinking? What does he want?

Does he want to take it now? Right here, like this — like the monster he currently is?

‘Goddess, please, not like this. Not from something wearing barely half a man's shape.’

My back hit the wall behind me. I glanced desperately in both directions. No door. No window. Nowhere left to run.

He kept sniffing, closing the distance between us with slow, deliberate steps.

"No — please, don't." My voice cracked apart entirely, tears spilling freely down my face. "Don't do this."

He shoved me down onto the floor.

My skull cracked against the stone hard enough to send white light sparking behind my eyes, and before I could recover, he was over me, pinning both my wrists above my head with bruising force.

I fought him anyway — twisting, kicking, sobbing — knowing even as I did it that it wouldn't matter, that whatever strength I had left was nothing against him.

He lowered his head to my chest and inhaled deeply.

Something in me simply broke apart at the wrongness of it.

The helplessness of being reduced to nothing but whatever he couldn't stop chasing.

Then, in one violent motion, his claws caught the neckline of my dress and tore it straight down the middle, exposing my bra to eyes that no longer looked entirely like a man's.

‘Goddess, don’t let this happen.’