All Chapters of THE BEAST WHO LOVED ME: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

The summons came at dusk.Margot knew it was coming before the servant knocked on her door. She had felt it in her bones all day that strange, heavy stillness that preceded disaster. The way the birds had gone silent in the garden. The way her mother had looked through her at breakfast as if she were already a ghost.She had been reading when the knock came. A worn volume of poetry, its spine cracked and pages yellowed with age. She closed it slowly, marking her place with a ribbon she had saved from her sister's discarded gown. Waste not, want not. That was what her nursemaid used to say. Before she was dismissed. Before Margot learned that nothing and no one in this house stayed forever.The servant's face was carefully blank. "Your father requests your presence in his study, my lady."Not requests. Demands. Her father never requested anything. He commanded. He expected. And the forgotten daughter, the third child, the one who had never quite mattered, was expected to obey."Te

He paled. "My lady""I'm joking." She wasn'tHe lapsed into silence after that.They traveled for three days. The landscape grew wilder, more untamed. The villages grew sparse. The roads grew rougher.And then, on the evening of the third day, she saw it.The tower.It rose from the cliffs like a dark finger pointing at the sky. Jagged and ancient and impossible. It was magnificent. It was terrifying. It was where she would either die or be reborn.She felt something shift inside her. Not fear, exactly. Something stranger. Something that felt almost like anticipation.She was going to face the beast. She was going to survive. She was going to prove everyone wrong.Or she was going to die trying.The carriage stopped at the base of the tower.The soldiers opened the door. They didn't offer to help her out. They didn't offer to carry her trunk. They just stood there, waiting, their faces carefully blank.She climbed out on her own.The tower loomed above her. It was even more massive u

It was a massive room, circular, with shelves that rose three stories high. Books in every language, every age, every subject. Some were bound in leather, others in crumbling parchment. Some had been eaten by worms, others were pristine.She walked through the shelves, trailing her fingers along their spines. She read titles aloud, tasting the words on her tongue.She hadn't realized how much she had missed books. In Ashford Manor, she had been allowed to read—her mother had considered it a harmless, useless hobby for a girl who was never going to marry well. But she had been limited to the old library, the one with the water-stained volumes and the broken shelves.This library was different. This library was alive.She pulled down a volume of poetry and opened it at random. The words were beautiful, aching, full of love and loss and longing.She read aloud."Even in the darkness, there is light. Even in the silence, there is song. Even in the death of hope, there is—""You're reading