The West Wing
322 Words
Days passed in a careful routine. Belle ate her meals alone, walked the corridors, read from the modest collection of books in the hallway, and exchanged increasingly warm conversations with the servants. The castle fascinated her — each room held some new wonder, some tapestry or sculpture or musical instrument she had never encountered in books.
Cogsworth gave her a tour, stiffly proper but secretly delighted to have an audience for his considerable knowledge of architecture and history. He showed her the portrait gallery, the ballroom (which made her catch breath), the conservatory filled with winter plants, and the east tower. He steered her firmly away from the western corridor.
Of course, that made Belle want nothing more than to see what lay in the west.
That night, she waited until the castle was quiet and slipped down the western hall. The door at the end was heavy and carved with thorns. She pushed it open.
The West Wing was a ruin. Furniture overturned and slashed. Portraits ripped from the walls. Curtains shredded. In the center of the debris, on a table draped in torn velvet, sat a glass dome — and beneath it, the enchanted rose. Its petals glowed faintly, three of them already fallen to the base of the dome. The surrounding magic hummed with a quiet, mournful frequency that made Belle's heartache without knowing why.
She reached out toward the dome.
"What are you doing?!"
The Beast's roar erupted from the doorway. Belle stumbled backward, nearly knocking the rose from the table. The Beast lunged forward and steadied it, breathing hard, his eyes wild with something that wasn't just anger — it was terror.
"Get OUT!" he bellowed. "And NEVER come back here!"
Belle ran. She did not stop until she had retrieved her cloak and her horse and ridden into the forest, her heart hammering, her eyes blurred. She was done. She was leaving. The agreement be damned.
- Writer
